Althought the paper manages not to mention it, the chemistry they are doing here is (the alkyne azide cyclisation) is part of "click" chemistry, which is quite well known.

What the paper doesn't really say is whether they hope to accomplish anything further with this. As with all biomimetic reaction, it seems (to me) that synthesising a single step in the process may be intersting, without doing all the previous steps, is there any practical point?

Not a problem, we can outsmart them:
"Killbots have a pre-set kill-limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them, 'till they reached their limit and shut down"

work gave me an Asus Eee slate to use. Using one note for drawing, annotating ck.is great Handwriting is also pretty good most of the him! (win 7) Hope I don't sand like a corporate whore

Remember, this is the country that is putting its scientists on trial for failing to predict and earthquake.

That was what I assumed it was too, and TFA didn't give any details ("Ride the Light" sounds like a new rollercoaster).
I would imagine, with the amount of use this technology would get (i.e., number of launches) that any ozone created would be tiny as compared with the amount in the upper atmosphere.*

But I dont see how this will get us into space. The higher the craft, the less efficient the push per beam of light.

* This argument may have been made about CFCs, exhaust emission, etc so I may have to eat my words...

Apparently, you can put all those annoying loyalty cards on here too, which is nice, as I have loads of them and only one debit card.

600 euros? thats a lot of mars bars..............

This is the same party that vetoed an £80 million loan to Forgemasters, the Sheffield steel company, that would have allowed them to make pieces for nuclear reactors. The loan was cut as a cost saving measure. I guess that saving will be wiped out when we have to buy from overseas. Good thinking!

I would say that a 'self-sustaining' system of chemical reactions is life, or at least as good a definition as possible that would encompass even the most basic of lifeforms we know of. Whether those lifeforms are selfcontained (cells) or just an amorphous goop of chemicals that can catalyst the formation of themselves (or each other) in such a way as to eventually convert a significant part of their local ecosystem into clones of themselves (a possible/probable starting point for abiogenesis) is not a distinction it is possible to make when defining the origins of life.

You could say that about any technology. Pretty much everything we have made up until now will be replaced by something better in the long term. Even sliced bread seems to have been replaced by the wrap.......

As an non-US citizen.....

I would expect you to stop putting spending bills and prisoner transfers bills into one package.

It seems such a weird way of doing business. If a measure can't stand on its own, it shouldn't stand at all.