As someone active in biomedical research (inflammation, not directly cancer) I can say that any claims that cancer researchers do not want to find a cure and that there would be some sort of "conspiracy" holding progress back is pure bullshit. The sad truth is that cancer is not a single disease and lately it has become evident that even within a single patient, the population of cancer cells can be highly divergent (including the still controversial idea about "cancer stem cells", which are non-dividing and thus resistant to most chemotherapy). There are lots of very interesting data still in basic research which will take years before they get out into clinic and sadly there are also very promising drug candidates that due to economic reasons will have a difficult time getting promoted by drug companies. One of those examples is salicylic acid - which has shown very promising results against colon cancer and a number of other types. The problem is that it is an old drug of natural origin which is basically impossible to patent. This means that no companies are interested in funding phase I to III trials (which is actually the most expensive part of drug development). Other highly interesting developments at the moment are the cancer-specific T-cell treatments (or vaccinations), which I do believe will become a future treatment strategy - unfortunately most of this research is publicly funded at the universities and the industry only steps in after they are nearly sure that they will be able to reap the benefits.

Just like anti-GMO environmentalists are complete whackos. It seems like to be a rational green is impossible in the political landscape of today - either you go with the crazy people that are against stuff that really reduces environmental impact (nuclear power, glyfosate resistance, Bt toxin) or you end up in the camp that don't give a shit about the environment and think it is OK to drill for oil in sensitive environments and such.

... or we could all sit around and hope for fission power to be a viable energy source before coal kills us all - hey Duke Nukem Forever is released and E17 is about to be. The end result may not be all what it was hyped up to be but nothing is impossible.

An artificial womb might not primarily be interesting for human reproduction, but for example in conservational biology to re-establish near extinct species, this could be a great tool! Coupled with the technologies of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS), where one can de-differentiate a mature somatic cell and then differentiate it into sperm and egg cells we could also generate a large progeny even from a limited number of individuals. Further, the same technology could theoretically be used to surpass many of the reproductive species barriers and make it possible to generate completely new hybrid species. Especially since one could do repeated cycles of embryonic stem cell to egg/sperm differentiations in vitro, one could in this way generate completely new species out of invitro hybrid breeding. I have no idea how far apart species can be with this method, but regulations probably would have to be put in place to avoid generation of new sub-species of humans generated by in vitro hybrid breeding with the other great apes. Who knows... perhaps it would even be possible to breed crocodiles and birds and get some sort of approximation of dinosaurs using this method...

If this was true, we would expect people genetically originating from poorly evolved cultures (there are still hunter-gatherer cultures out there) to be on average smarter than people with a genetic origin from people who have been living in agricultural/industrialized cultures for millenia. I do not think that anyone has observed something like that.

If I remember correctly, OpenBSD was looking at PCC as alternative compiler. It would in a way fit their philosophy better considering that it is simpler/cleaner and pure C, so C++ does not have to become a systems dependency. In fact, PCC has also made some rather nice advances lately, like building a FreeBSD kernel, and there is always the challenge of building a Linux kernel with pcc (http://bsdfund.org/bundle/).

You should definitely try compiling something with LLVM/Clang sometime. The error messages that you get are quite nice and stuff normally compiles much faster compared to similar optimization level with GCC. For a source-based distribution like FreeBSD or Gentoo that might be a nice boon. Some developers (the Chromium ones if I am not mistaken) have switched to LLVM/Clang for their development, but they still ship the final binaries built with GCC.

Anyone else noticed the similarities between tentacles and noodly appendages? The flying spaghetti monster - Chutulu's second coming?

Yeah sure, but you have to look at the symbolism of the scenes. There was a reason why they showed him wearing a black glove. The same is true for another really good scene in in that episode where Luke is hiding from Vader refusing to fight him, then there is a scene with half of Luke's face covered in shadow while Vader provokes him and finds out about Leia.

There was basically a plot clue in Episode 6. Luke's hand had turned black. He succumbed to rage while defeating his father (using the "dark side", taking the first steps). Basically he will rediscover the ways of the Sith while Leia becomes the "mother" of a new order of Jedi.

Just like I believe that we will get cybernetically enhanced I also think genetic modifications will happen. In the beginning probably just modifications of somatic cells like in gene therapy. For example, they have already demonstrated that green-red color blindness in male macaques can be cured by gene therapy. Bevause of this it is likely that the same technique could be used on adult humans to get the UV vision of birds. When this is common the next logical step is germline modifications... I think this future is far more likely than yhe molecular marker assisted selection of complex traits suggested in this article. Especially brcause you might loose a lot good with the bad if you start selecting on complex traits.

This sounds like the background plot for "Plan9 from outerspace"... althought there it was a chain reaction from cleaving photons or something... let's just look out for zombies anyway...shall we?

Thanks! The FreeBSD port may definitely give some hints and according to it, the number of dependencies are lower (http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=^php53-5.3.14&stype=name). One of the OSes that I try to build in is Plan9 with APE (ANSI POSIX ENVIRONMENT) and then some of those things are also not part of it, but I have managed to go through the configure phase so it might be possible. I do however have to generate mkfiles myself and the BSD makefiles did not seem to give information about the minimal core in the sources to generate the "php" binary. I am suspecting the "main" directory and "sapi/cli" and possibly "ext/posix" to be part of the absolute minimal core. Anything else? Another system I am looking at is a musl libc-based linux system.

Is anyone aware of an alternative php interpreter that does not require tons of external dependecies? I have been playing with porting various stuff to less usual operating systems and PHP has definitely been one of the most dificult things I have undertaken. It requires quite a lot of other packages to first be ported.

Sure. As long as there would be a selective pressure for such a behavior. There are however some caveats: cats do not have the best "starting material" (like hands) to evolve into something that would benefit from such things (crows on the other hand could be a rather interesting bet...). There are tons of examples of how sub-optimal evolution really is (how our eyes for example evolved from a proto-eye which limited the possible end result, whereas other independently evolved eyes have much better "design") because it builds on a previously existing part (adapted for something else). After writing this answer I realized that I missed pointing out the most obvious: the "housecat" will be long dead when the "university math professor evolved from housecats" exists just like the proto-apes that were the ancestors of us and the other modern apes are long extinct.