She's probably just now getting to work, seeing as she's Canadian and has a real day job.

The mole is the number of atoms contained in the mass in grams of the average atomic mass of any substance. Hardly arbitrary.

If you are going to rip off The Economist wholesale, please include in your submission at least an acknowledgment of the original source beyond merely the URL of the originating site. It's only polite.

Can someone with access to the full article tell us whether or not the researchers assessed that the consoles were actually installed, and that the parents allowed the children to use them? I know if I showed up at home with some random game console my mother would have said, your father will have to install it, and when Dad got home he would have wanted to have dinner and watch TV all evening. If there's only one TV, the kids are going to lose out on using it.

Yes, I know that these are elementary schoolers which means that their parents were involved in signing the consent for them for the study. I also know just how good people are at following through on things they've signed up for for themselves, nevermind their kids.

This has actually become an issue over some international treaties; the Executive branch is the one that is empowered to sign the treaty, but it must be ratified by the congressional branch. I don't recall a particular example at the moment, but there have been some treaties where the POTUS has signed the agreement and it has not been ratified, causing various international problems with countries that don't have this odd bifurcated approval process (that is, nearly all of them) and think hey, you signed this! and the Congress goes, yeah, but we didn't agree to it, so nyah.

Many non-photosensitive congenitally blind people have what is called non-24 hour sleep-wake disorder, where their circadian rhythm is basically free floating. Blind people who are still photosensitive have lower incidence of this disorder, as long as they get some light each day (preferably morning sunlight).

Somehow this is an insult to Mohammed? Wha? Makes no sense whatsoever. And Interpol should be saved for big stuff anyway, not doctrinal differences. Whoever authorized the arrest needs some remedial training.

The retinal cells of interest are neurons. Neurons differentiate very early in development - to my knowledge no one has yet developed an IPS that can reliably be made to differentiate into high-quality neurons.

As to scarcity, in order to maintain the totipotentency of the existing lines my understanding is that they _must_ be divided occasionally (early blastocyte stage I think), or they devolve into pluripotent cells. The process generates spares by its very nature.

Do you know what I do when I'm handed one of those insulting little sheets of paper? I look at the staff and say something like "I'm not a functionally illiterate idiot. Tell me what I really need to know."

You may be interested in CSA programs. Here's a good place to start: http://www.localharvest.org/

He already did, though I don't recall the username. It was somebody who's pretty reasonable most of the time. A few months ago.

We never see this kind of bullshit statement when it's some teenage guy who wins these prizes. Yes, she has an advisor. So does every single PhD candidate in the country, and no one questions their work. In fact, those students are often fighting to have their work recognized at all!

How would you know? You compare the genetic profile of the new tumor and the old and if they're the same (or closely similar, with a base mutation profile that fits while allowing for some subsequent mutation - cancer cells' DNA replication procedures being obviously a bit off) well gosh, they missed a cell. It's pretty easy to do, after all, we're talking on the order of a few microns. As for how it can come back after some period of time, typically one only stays on cancer-suppressing drugs for a few years, for very good reasons relating to side effects and decreasing efficacy.

It would be fairly uncommon though not impossible to have multiple spontaneous oncogenic changes in a single individual, and if that did occur, they were likely exposed to some nasty stuff at some point in their life.

That's awesome! I had written you off based on the combination of LED and gro in the domain, but I might go poke around a bit. I walked into the local hydroponics shop and asked what bulbs would be best for growing lettuce in my closet and they looked at me like I had a second head when I insisted that no, I really meant lettuce.