The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots.

So we can't stop our poor dumb natural immune systems from attacking our own bodies, and we're just a few short years away from telling it what to do?

If you just pick 24 random SNPs, they may not be particularly informative for your population (i.e. they may be monomorphic or have very low minor allele frequencies that don't help you discriminate individuals). So you want to pick markers that are bi or even tri-allelic with high MAFs for your population, to make sure they vary enough from person to person to tell them apart.

Sadly, a genotype fingerprint of just 24 well-selected markers is enough to differentiate an individual, with an error rate far lower than 1/ # of people on the planet. So while having names attached to samples is ethically deplorable, in practice it doesn't really even matter. I do genetic research, and the first thing we do is de-identify samples in the database. When we get samples from other sites with names still on them, we get pissed at the site. It's just sloppy, and certainly doesn't help the research.

So is this 30x higher than the 100x higher that was reported here on Slashdot a few months ago? http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/10/06/1641232/Universe-Has-100x-More-Entropy-Than-We-Thought

You need vitamin D, sunlight, and working kidneys in order to render it useful. You can get all the vitamin D you want in your diet, but without sunlight, it cannot be converted into a usable form by the kidneys. This is why they put northern Swedish and Norwegian kids under sun lamps for a few minutes every day. Thankfully, you really only need a few minutes of direct sunlight to covert enough vitamin D to last a while.

For such an interesting result, its a bit surprising that they went for "The Journal of Neural Engineering". Impact factor = 2.7. Only been around since 2004. I don't want to denigrate science that gets published in lower-impact journals (because lots of good stuff ends up there), but the impact here is not congruous with the potential scientific and social ramifications of the results. I think some of the issues raised above might have something to do with it.

I can only hope that this heavy-lift launch system will support a public option with early buy-in and that none of this NASA budget will be appropriated to state-supported abortions. Otherwise, it will apparently have a hard time getting through the senate.

LIDAR; bred for its skills and magic.

So basically this is not permanent at all, just subject to the whims of yet another overlord.

Of note, this is single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping, and NOT sequencing. Only 700K common variants will be genotyped. While individuals could certainly be identified in the database by their SNPs (as few as 24), this project does not employ high-throughput sequencing. The title of the summary is misleading.

So I can tell my wife that I cannot cook dinner tonight because the result would be so abhorrent that nature might send an agent back in time to destroy me before I can create it. Ergo, any movement toward making dinner could very well result in my demise...so let that be on her conscience.