I saw a school looking for biology teachers in it's English Program (Thai students taking core classes in English) on Ajarn.com, which is the main teaching job site for Thailand. Take a peek through there. It IS mostly English jobs, but others do pop up.

Seriously, though. Don't expect much pay. By Thai standards it's decent, but I'm only making ~$16,000US per year, working at a Thai Government School. You can probably make much more (up to double or triple that) if you have the qualifications to work at an international school.

While I have a degree in Marine Biology and nearly a decade of teaching experience, mostly ESL but going on my 3rd year of Biology, I don't actually have any formal teaching certifications... that limits me. But, then again, I don't know if I'd have the freedom over what I teach at another school; at my school, I'm the first biology teacher they've ever had with an actual degree in Biology, and that gives me some power. ;)

"Good, but not without flaws" comes closest.

I love my job (high school biology teacher in Thailand), because I love biology and I love teaching. I just don't like most of the other teachers here, or the administration, and the pay sucks. But, I have pretty much complete freedom to teach what and how I want within the general bounds of the biology curriculum, and that is worth a lot.

Yeah, I know...cool story, bro

(at least my students have a good solid foundational understanding of the theory of evolution) ;)

I wish the director or producer or whoever would fix the implementation, though. Unlike Choose Your Own Adventure books, I'm finding it impossible in this so called "real life" thing to go back and try the other choice. :-/

*keeps finger on the page of the choice to post this or not, in case I want to go back and try the other way*

Uh... quite a lot and quite a bit. He's an accomplished molecular biologist by all accounts. Here's a Google Scholar search for his name.

To name some of the journals and publications he's appeared in...
- Nature
- Science
- Cell
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
- Annual Review of Biochemistry

It also appears that he has written a few books on the subject.

HOWEVER, it is important to note that the YouTube videos that have appeared are over-simplified and intended for the layman. But, make no mistake, the man has earned his place and has a good idea of what he is talking about.

You really shouldn't need to apologize for "geekiness" on Slashdot. If we can't reference and/or link to actual scientific research without apology, then something must be very wrong with this site. ;)

That said, the paper you mentioned looks really interesting. AND, a Google Scholar search offers a link to a freely downloadable PDF for those of you, like myself, that don't have access to Nature.

I'm looking forward to reading this. :)

Isn't this old news? (pun not entirely intended)... A couple of the more prominent abiogenesis hypotheses have been based on this for most of the decade of not more. Here's a paper from 2003 that, while it has its flaws (some of which have been rectified, some of which have been completely rethought over the last 7 years) offers a fairly complete and very compelling hypothesis for how life may have originated at warm, alkaline thermal vents like those found at the Lost City thermal vent fields:

Martin, W. & Russell, M.J., 2003. On the origins of cells: a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 358(1429), 59-83; discussion 83-5. Available at: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/358/1429/59.abstract.

And here's a similar but competing hypothesis (still based on Fe/Ni-S, but with a different idea on the origins of membranes and cells):

Wächtershäuser, G., 2006. From volcanic origins of chemoautotrophic life to Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 361(1474), 1787-806; discussion 1806-8. Available at: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/361/1474/1787.abstract

The latter author has been writing papers about this hypothesis since 1992 (though I haven't read his first paper on the subject).

Point being, this doesn't seem to be a new thing, especially as summarized in the summary here and in the linked article. The original paper on which the article is based offers a bit more fundamental chemical details regarding the transition metals involved, and suggests good directions for experimental confirmation or refutation, but the overall idea remains pretty much the same, it seems. Still, it will be interesting to see what, if any, research and experiments result from this.

Keep in mind, this isn't the final vehicle design. This is just the first prototype, and they are sending up a crash test dummy. In the Something Awful thread I linked above, they talk about redesigning to make the position more feasible for a living person to go up in. The final rocket design is larger than the one they are preparing to test launch, which will have more room for better positions.

As for G-suits, I think they mentioned using the kind of flight suit that Chinese MiG pilots use. I'm sure a sealed helmet and an air-supply will also be included.

I caught this story on Fark, and they linked to a really good thread over on the Something Awful forums with posts directly from these people.
We've made the world's amateur largest space rocket

If you don't want to read all 17 pages, just skim through looking for posts by user frumpykvetchbot.

This is completely awesome, and I wish them the best of luck with the test launch this weekend. :D

Or, perhaps an Apple engineer saw the App and saw the name and thought "Hey, does it do this? Ah, no, the app is completely different. But, hey, this is a pretty cool idea. Let's see... implement it like this and do that like so and... Hey, does anyone have an App that does that? No? Hmmmm... let's see." "What are you doing, #Engineer?" "Hey, boss, check this out. Does this seem like a workable idea?" "Yeah, it does. Perhaps we should take steps to protect it before someone else comes up with it."

I.e. it's seems at least equally likely that a developer was just inspired by this app than that Apple has their developers tasked with looking for inspiration or patentable ideas from AppStore submissions.

Just a thought.

That's not "broken English with a horrid Singaporean accent". It's Singlish. A lot of Singaporeans can and do speak "normal" English just fine, but when they talk to each other, they speak in their own local dialect, which is a funky mix of English, Chinese, and slang.

I actually kind of like how Singlish sounds, though I can't understand a word of it.

I have information in my head right now that you probably do not have. If I refuse to share any of this information with you for free (or just refuse because I don't want to share it with you), am I violating your rights?

I do. I have a sucky internet connection, and most of the people I want to play with are on the other side of the planet, so unless we get a time with low traffic and find a decent server somewhere in the middle, someone gets stuck with 400ms pings, which make L4D(2) worthless.

However, as a somewhat mindless zombie killing bit of stress relief, it is fine on the single player mode, and the characters can be quite amusing. Plus, they never shoot you in the face. ;)

I like L4D(2) very much for both the multiplayer and the single player. Sometimes you don't want to deal with other people and just want to kill zombies. Sometimes you like the challenge of trying to get through a level on your own on Expert difficulty. Sometimes you don't want to deal with the idiots in pub games while your friends are all offline. While I agree that it doesn't really have a "strong" single player, it can still be quite an enjoyable single player experience. They actually did a good job of balancing that, rather than making it one of those games that is impossible or exceptionally boring to play on single player.

For those without access to Nature, a Google Scholar search turns up a freely downloadable PDF of the full article.

PDF Link

I remember reading about this in Sagan's "The Pale Blue Dot", and thought it was such an awesome idea. I'm looking forward to reading the original paper. :)

I also have some of my class writing and personal writing from the mid- to late 90s, but format shifting and such has left my oldest timestamp to be 2000. :-/

Not sure if you want real answers to those or not, but obviously the molecule, and evidence suggests the prion. However, with prions your question doesn't quite make sense because it's not like viruses descended from prions. Prions are simply "rogue" proteins which force proteins that they come in contact with to conform to the same secondary structure (usually beta folded sheets). It is thought that amino acid chains probably formed (perhaps without any necessary "function") early during the origin of life, and were quite possibly prion-like. Here's an interesting paper about it:

Milner-White, E.J. & Russell, M.J., 2008. Predicting the conformations of peptides and proteins in early evolution. Biology direct, 3, 3. Available at: http://biology-direct.com/content/3/1/3.

And, obviously, since molecules are required to make cells (as cells are made up of molecules), the molecule would have to come first. There are some hypotheses about the origins of life suggesting that it is possible that most or all of of the biochemistry of early cells were in place before they even became cells. Here's a good starting point read about that:

Martin, W. & Russell, M.J., 2003. On the origins of cells: a hypothesis for the evolutionary transitions from abiotic geochemistry to chemoautotrophic prokaryotes, and from prokaryotes to nucleated cells. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 358(1429), 59-83; discussion 83-5. Available at: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/358/1429/59.abstract.

Anyway, like I said, don't know if you were looking for possible answers to those questions, but I'm bored, and these papers are pretty interesting. ;)