tailor a bacteria to attack or compete with a bacteria which you needed to control
This already exists in the from of a virus which attacks bacteria, also known as a Bacteriophage. It doesn't even have to be programmed from the outside to keep up with the evading, evolving bacteria; it just evolves as well. And even if you wanted to "program" this feature, you'd have to deal with the nasty problem of protein folding in silico. Better to leave this entire process highly parallel in wetware.
programmable immune system
Also known as Vaccination, and this happens naturally after every infection. And again you don't have to program anything, it uses a random walk to find matching antibodies which attach themselves to bugs.
This discovery will sooner result in a very parallel, but also clockrate wise very slow computer than in immunological advances. And if this gets used in the human body via gene therapy it will be used to regulate genes, i.e. as an if/else block, not to calculate anything fancy.
Two things:
Don't Panic!
Oh, but you do get mutations! In fact, mutations which allow you to defeat H1N1! And not just a single replaced amino acid, no, lots more! Now how does that silly virus look?
When an immune systems B-cell find something it doesn't like, such as a virus, it goes into a feedback loop, mutates itself so that some copies will dislike said virus even more. In the end you have an immune system against which this virus doesn't stand a chance even though it was a completely unknown pathogen hours earlier. And this response will remain intact for years! (see: vaccination) This is called somatic hypermutation. On the downside, somatic means it won't make it into your germ line so your children will have to mutate all on their own again (though IIRC some of the mothers immune system cells make it into the child to help out a bit).
As much as nuclear energy would help reduce CO2 emissons, the the anti-nuclear crowd has to be seen as a "force of nature" making new power plants less likely. The idealist would fight against irrationality, but as a realist I would redirect that energy elsewhere, e.g. against the NIMBYs who think wind turbines ruin the coastlines and kill birds or bats.
Also, if oil is non-renewable because it takes millions of years to re-form, then nuclear fuels are the ultimate non-renewable with a "when is the next supernova due?" regeneration period. And the energy density and relative ease of use is just too good to waste it powering our washing machines and slashdot browsing. Maybe in a few hundred years outer solar system exploration will be in a serious crunch because the lack of a good power source after all the uranium, thorium, plutonium etc. has been used up.
At first this "Because there's obviously no sunlight in the body, this light-mill pulls its power from a laser run up through the center of the catheter." seemed rather silly. When you already have a cable why not use that to get all the power you want? But later on the articles mentions that blood vessels really don't like anything above one volt. Other generators/motors (applying an alternating external magnetic field maybe) produce too much voltage already, so producing the power via photons is a safe alternative.
On a related note, I wonder how far the tech for burning blood sugar in a fuel cell is, that would allow for long independent operation of tiny devices and since nothing rotates should scale low wrt. voltage
Yes, the Enigma algorithm, or actually wiring, was known and Polish and later English Cryptologists worked long and hard to crack it since a lot was at stake. This one as of now relied a lot on security through obscurity. I doubt it would have lasted long in a world war scenario.
Just as the Enigma it might be impossible to de-cypher it manually, but with a machine and Turing-level minds to help you I would think it is solved quickly. But since secure encryption is perceived as a solved problem (still, where is the AES equivalent of a secure hash?) maybe bright minds turn their attention elsewhere nowadays.
The influx of money should raise the standard of living [in] those countries and it might encourage a different sort of economic growth than what we've seen in economies fueled by petrodollars.
What growth? Countries which get essentially "free money" often have shrinking economies . Whether they get paid for oil underground or sun shining on the ground doesn't matter. They don't become poor, but they end up importing everything because local labor is so unattractive an expensive. See Dutch disease etc., this was just recently discussed on
And these solar arrays are probably built by non-local companies, so no local know-how is rewarded. Then the states just get monetary compensation for maintenance work, not for fabricating anything. Now how to build a local economy.
Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file.