I signed without reading it, honest... So sorry folks! If only I had known before.

This article is completely misleading. What they developed is an ATP-dependent ratiometric dye. It is nice but it is not the first ratiometric dye. It is also not the first fluorescent ATP reporter. How will this stop scientists to use animals? It won't. It is just one more tool in an already vast existing array of tools to study cells using fluorescence imaging. This journalist is an idiot. Where are the cells going to come from? For most practical interesting cases, they are going to be "extracted" from animals. Also while ATP is indeed an important molecule, it is really naive to believe that monitoring ATP alone can tell you anything about the state of a cell, especially in vivo, except whether or not it has enough glucose and oxygen. If it was as simple as "expose them to the substance under investigation." to find something worthwhile, everybody would already do it using calcium reporters, NADH autofluorescence, glucose reporters or any other of the numerous similar tools already available on the market.

Osama did not crash a plane against the twin towers, he sent other people to do it for him. People running terrorist organisations are not crazy, just power hungry. Blow up a dirty bomb in the middle of NYC? Sure, they are not going to be anywhere near NYC when it happens and they can watch it on TV. Releasing a deadly flu virus which will wipe out 60% of mankind? When you are yourself an ageing man living in a vastly agricultural region with little to no modern infrastructures? No thanks.

Now that the whole world knows what it is about and since some of the results (if not all) have already been presented at public events, it seems likely that the information will anyway percolate to the scientific community at large in the years to come. Moreover, the virus does not seem like a very good weapon to me as it is simply impossible to control or contain its propagation once released. This is the reason why modern armies do not use gas for instance. The Germans tried it during the first world war and it proved to be rather unpredictable making it in effect useless.

It sounds like it is straight out of a South Park episode... More seriously, there is an interesting article about the brain and video games which touches on these issues in the last issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v12/n12/abs/nrn3135.html (subscription needed).

José (yes I know him) is Spanish and works at the EPFL in Switzerland.

Anyway, grants are reviewed by people in the same field as the applicant. When you are asked to review grants, you are normally at that stage in your career when you know most of the people in your field and can easily guess from whom the grant is coming.

This type of projects is not particularly known to be cheap. Supercomputers are expensive and cost quite a bit just to have them powered and maintained (I heard 1 mio US$/yr electricity bill for a IBM Blue Gene). Plus all these projects are run by a large consortium. Most experienced scientists tend to think of them as expensive useless toys and I tend to agree for all the reasons the parent has mentioned. We are nowhere near understanding rodent physiology well enough to create a model that has any relevant predictive capacities. The proliferation of these projects is not explained by their success. Funding bodies like them because they can pretend that it will ultimately replace animal research. The whole simulation community likes them because it gives them access to the vast pool of life science funding. Also as far as I know, the Virtual Physiological Human thing in Europe is not a single project but a umbrella initiative divided in many disconnected projects which are probably more manageable (this is not to say that the EU does not have the same attraction for the BIG science projects).

I am sure they are going to sale a lot of them. Even as a first hand customer this will limit the interest of the game.

And what about that one http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(11)00132-2? This debate is far from being settled.

I would tend to agree with you but it seems likely that Father Steve is not going to run Apple for several more decades. I wonder how much of this "closing" comes from his drive and if this culture is going to stay or be abandoned as he ultimately leaves the direction of the company to someone else. Time will tell.

Or FaceTime? Just kidding...

/. feels a bit like OS X Daily today.

It's a nice feat but there is still a long way to go before this thing matches what a real synapse do.

If you are in the US. Europe, Japan, Korea, China, etc... probably account nowadays for more than half of publications and there is no such requirements that I know of for them.