I lolled very hard, damn you. The coffee, it's everywhere!

You forgot Nautical mile you insensitive clod!

Except it is marketed as not being a medicine (homeopathic) otherwise it would have been required to mention said loss of smell as a side effect.

Actually zebrafish embryos are the perfect model for large scale small compound screens, they are vertebrates like humans unlike other model organisms suitable for large screens like yeast, worms (C. elegans) and fruitfly (D. melanogaster). Why do you think zebrafish embryos are that much different then humans? A large portion of the zebrafish proteins are very homologous to human ones. If a compound has the desired effect on zebrafish it's very easy to verify in a tissue culture setting if it has the same effect on the human homologue.

You realize that the species in the example you give (banteng (a bovine species) and a cow) are much, much more related than anything we have walking around right now will resemble a dinosaur, right?

To be honest I didn't know cross-species cloning was possible, also I don't think it will never be possible to clone a dinosaur, just not right now. I just wanted to point out that it is not as easy as putting some DNA in a cell and let it grow. PS: morphologically similar doesn't say much, birds are still more closely related. Although alligator appearance didn't change much over the course of millions of years doesn't mean that some essential mechanisms like embryogenesis did.

Yes, I'm sure a professor in paleontology will now everything about the genetic problems that will arise...

To name a few: Mere DNA is not sufficient for an fertilized oocyte to develop, generally an oocyte contains maternally provided protein and RNA, where are you going to get those? Second is epigenetics: The DNA generally contains a lot of modifications to "switch on or off" genes, during embryonic development the DNA is heavily reprogrammed, those cues are probably very species specific, again where are we going to get an dinosaur oocyte??? I'm sure there are even more difficulties to overcome.

As a scientist working with a lot of imaging data I can tell you that Photoshop is provided by my institution and our license allows installation on private computers as well (as long as you are employed). So using photoshop cost me nothing, but requires me to leave that windows partition on my computer.

So since I already have photoshop at work and know how to use it, why whould I bother to learn how to use GIMP so I can do some work at home? To be honest, I might if I had to pay for it but not very likely, I would just make sure I wouldn't need to do any such work at home at all.

Of course the star will function as the light source, but as I understand the current method of finding exoplanets is looking for regular fluctuations in star spectra caused by their orbiting planet(s). In order for *this* to work light reflected on the planet needs to be intercepted.

How would resetting them horizontally help in that case either? Seems to me that putting them on roofs spreads the chance of breakdown. Sure some roofs can be blown of, but not all of them. If that hurricane passes right over that solar power generator you risk losing all power at once.

Good point, I wondered about this too. I lived in Boston for a year and realize it is considered perfectly normal in the States, but WHY is the normal local police not sufficient for a campus? Especially in say Boston College where the campus is located within the city? When I was there I never had the feeling that crime is so bad as to justify hiring extra police to do that job...

I like your reductio ad absurdam, but by the same reasoning, suppose the hardware salesman is the only one in town and suddenly decides that hammers are worth 1 million dollars. Now this dead cat is starting to look mighty appealing, also maybe this road where the cat was found has other things to offer, like rocks!

Anyway, my point is price is never irrelevant, but free is not always better either.

you are right, I didn't know ;-)