What research, exactly?

It's still a shortcut, and it still piggybacks on Google's superior engine. Whereas Google would be able to figure out that "torsoraphy" is a misspelled "tarsorrhaphy," Microsoft - rather than figuring this out - looks at Google to see what they corrected it to be, and then gives the user that search result. Bottom line: wherever they are deficient they use Google to fill in, and that means Bing is worse (and they realize it).

I can't help but think I can only benefit from Google and Microsoft fighting.

It's cheating because instead of generating good search results, they look at someone else's search results and output those. It's not theft, it's not illegal, but it is kind of a shitty thing to do. Or, here's how the guy interviewed in TFA said it (pretty well if you ask me):

You expected a deeply philosophical movie from Inception? Based on what? It was hyped for its stunning special effects and action sequences and directed by the guy who had just done two Batman movies. Inception delivers unless you went into it with ridiculous expectations.

If you don't understand celebrity worship, you've basically missed a huge chunk of human history.

Anti-gold. New millennium, new gold.

Then there is a big difference between speculative fiction and science fiction. I know which one Fringe is, mostly because there's never been a speculative fiction TV show, so what's the big deal? If you will only tolerate speculative fiction then don't get all worked up when you don't like science fiction (hint: some of the science is fictitious).

That's a terrible analogy. Consider instead: There is a lottery to determine whether or not the human race lives or dies. We wouldn't be around to comprehend any losing draws, so we make the (flawed) conclusion that we were always bound to have won.

Yes. I can see the rebuttal now: "How can you say the universe is not fine-tuned for us? We're here, aren't we?"

Yes, typo on my part.

Helium-2, rare earths, and who says we necessarily need to send everything back to Earth?

Man can surely destroy man though.

Of course your explanation may differ from the one given, but (again) as you may have guessed, they aren't going to put forward "we messed up" as an explanation, so something considerably more complicated must be invoked.

My background is strictly biology, so a lot of the physics stuff goes over my head, but I can decipher the sciencey jargon well enough to read the paper. Anyway, here's what they saw:

bacterial DNA in tube 1 -> water tube surrounded by 7hz field -> tube 2 containing PCR ingredients minus template -> recovery of bacterial DNA sequence from tube 2

The explanation, as you may have guessed, is super complicated. It involves the hypothetical creation of so-called water nanostructures (water memory anyone?), but apparently the ~7hz field is important and recapitulated in the math somehow that's opaque to me.

So that's the paper for dummies, so to speak. If anyone can elaborate or correct in simple terms I'd be happy to read it; this is cool stuff.