Acutally, you're wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings#2000s

Mod: Funny/Depressing

Agreed. That's taxpayer funded poop they're flushing!

This question was discussed in China Mieville's Kraken which featured (among other wackiness) a character who could teleport by completely breaking himself down into component molecules/atoms/energy/whatever and reassembling his entire body at his destination, like a Star Trek teleporter. This is distinct from, say, ripping a hole in space-time and walking through to a distant destination, since your body would remain intact for the journey. The upshot of course is that he "died" with every teleportation, and was haunted by dozens of ghosts - of all his dead selves killed by teleportation. Of course if ghosts aren't real, and there is no afterlife, then nobody would ever know or care, which I guess is how Roddenberry figured it. Similarly, in The Prestige Hugh Jackman's (pardon my reference to the movie, I never read the book) remarks that every time he used Tesla's duplication device he wondered whether he would be the one drowning, although of course from his point of view he survived (and would survive) 100% of the time.

Why can't God work through the government as well? If He instructs us to "render unto Caesar" then isn't it reasonable to accept what "Caesar" renders back to you? Not being snide, it just seems oddly inconsistent to me to say that God won't work through all available means to accomplish what He (presumably) desires.

Well since they've already got a veritable terror cornucopia of choice targets, what's the harm in adding one more? Sewage treatment, food distribution centers, your kids' schools, the security line at the airport, hospitals, etc etc.

I wish I had mod points, this is the best summary of the 2008 election ever.

For the "future of life" bit, could be something cool relating to our ability to live in space. After all, our current body of evidence suggests that we're the future of extraterrestrial life (speculation about Thursday notwithstanding).

Article here: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/26/apple-bans-android-magazine-app/

To hazard a guess, I imagine most of our cell division machinery wouldn't work very well with circular chromosomes. It's very important to get the chromosomal composition correct before division, that's why there are so many checks during the cell cycle (p53/cyclin system). Nondysjunction is the primary issue I foresee, which could have innumerable problems - cell differentiation, survival, etc. Cancer cells on the other hand don't care about all that, and in many cases their only goal (reproduction) is served by an abnormal chromosome content, as altering the copy number of genes can increase growth activators or decrease growth inhibitors through the loss or retention of whole chromosomes or fragments of chromosomes.

On the contrary, the vast majority of human cancers have telomerase (are "immortal"), perhaps what you're thinking of is the ability to grow in culture, which is a relatively rarer phenomenon (HeLa cell line!) but nowadays can be artificially induced. This makes sense because a cancer's rapid growth rate would be unsustainable in the long term without some way of getting around telomere loss. The rapid division combined with most cancer's predisposition to mutation results in natural selection for these specific kinds of mutations - the first cell to express telomerase, for example, will out-compete his shorter-lived brothers in the long run, so inevitably all cancers wind up circumventing the telomere issue in one way or another. If you've got access, you can read this nice review article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9282118

Telomerase activation doesn't "give" you cancer, but the lack of telomerase in most of our tissues is an important block to cancer. All cancers must find a way around the problem that telomerase solves - the incremental loss of genetic material with each successive cell division. Telomerase is not necessary or sufficient to cause cancer (they may also end up with cyclized chromosomes), but its control is likely tied to control of cancer.