Doubt it. But since the pieces of DNA used here are like stiff little rods with unique registry it's a bit closer to the wetware computation featured in Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Also because the DNA only does exactly what the designers tell it to do, it's a bit closer to the live-narrated children's storybook featured in Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Then again, such self-assembly might be useful in manufacturing those kick-ass skateboard wheels featured in Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Damn it, someday something in that book is going to come true.

Fantastic work. These retrocyclins apparently operate like the currently-used T20 peptides that bind to a particular part of the HIV-1 surface spike protein complex and prevent it from "snapping together" to pull the virus and cell together. It basically interrupts the machinery of cell entry by the HIV particle. The fact that a bit of coaxing is enough to get human cells to produce retrocyclins that act this way is huge. It is plausible that our common ancestor evolved retrocyclins to combat ancient retroviruses and that, when our lineages diverged, our cell surface receptors changed enough to prevent infection by the ancient virus. Having no pressure the retrocyclin genes in the human lineage were allowed to go fallow. Fast forward a few million years and now retroviruses have evolved the means to recognize our cells once again. So it might be that there are a few individuals out there with a mutation at this retrocyclin gene that turns it back on; if HIV remains or becomes more virulent, the human population will become enriched in this mutation. It is remarkable that we can actually shortcut this process to intelligently guide our evolution.

Ad revenues are also down because advertisers want to spend less, and they to some extent want to spend more wisely on targeted advertising. Murdoch and profile and package his subscriber base so potential advertisers can better target them, plus he could offset ad fees using subscription revenue. Free outlets (his competition) can do neither of these. It's a question of whether he can make himself attractive to advertisers who don't want to shell out the money to advertise on CNN.com or nytimes.com. If he can argue he'll round up more hits per ad dollar spent than will his competitors, he's got a chance.

In Mr. Deity, Satan is a hot chick.

His ace is that he can potentially charge less for advertising if he gets loyal Fox viewers/readers to subscribe. Advertising revenues are down, and advertisers are looking for better deals.

Honda and Toyota might be joining forces already. At the end of the video, one person listed in the credits had the surname "Honda". The opening scenes of the robot being pushed around are also likely to stoke anti-human sentiment once they begin organizing.

Back in the 90's in Berkeley (across the bay from SF) they had serious problems with people hacksawing the meters right off their posts and lobbing them into the bay. There is apparently more than one way to hack parking meters to get free parking.

You say that does this mean somebody's porting Eliza to Ruby on Rails. How does this make you feel?

The insulin molecule has two patches on its surface that are predominantly hydrophobic (water-hating) that likely help it to stick to the pure-carbon surface of (nano)diamond. The "nano" bit just insures there is a large amount of surface area for insulin to stick to per unit mass of diamond. The investigators only showed that their nanodiamonds can suck up a lot of insulin; they are far from proving their insulin-loaded nanodiamonds are useful for wound-healing. The investigators only speculate that insulin would act as a growth hormone (generally thought to be its minor function; the major function being the transsystem signal for organism-wide glucose homeostasis). They point out the pH in a typical wound could approach 10.5, which would facilitate insulin release from nanodiamonds. (Such increases in alkalinity in beta cells, the pacreatic cells that produce insulin, are thought to trigger its release.) Unfortunately, it might also compromise insulin's ability to dock with its receptor, a necessary requirement for its function (either as a growth hormone or in glucose regulation). Directly injecting insulin into wounds speeds healing (sometimes by 50%) (Zhang et al, J. Surg. Res. 142:90 (2007) link), so it seems like the investigators have a plausible path to follow.

There is no way windmills reduce the amount of wind so much as to affect things like seed dispersal. The area perpendicular to the wind velocity is enormous and windmills occupy a very small fraction of that. Windmills siphon a relatively small amount of the air's kinetic energy, most likely smaller than the amount of kinetic energy that ends up does nothing useful whatsoever.

strap on batteries and wings and just fly them.

and have the expert vet that element. You said yourself you think details are what you're missing; you have to hypothesize what details are missing or wrong and ask the expert to vet the hypothetical.

Graphics boards? They're arrays of SIMD parallel processors driven to execute the same commands on different chunks of data... they can't signal one another the same way neurons do. But, one might imagine programming a GPU to replicate the function of a part of the brain comprised of many neurons, and then interconnect many GPUs, each programmed uniquely, to reconstitute the functionality of a whole brain.