We have isolated proteins that regenerate heart tissue, we know some of the proteins we need to make to clean up the plaque that causes alzheimers and we ever have cures for many other diseases. The biggest problem we have is one of production since some of these proteins are just very hard to make. I have made some advances in the field that will save a few tens of thousands of people ever year right now and I am starting more advanced education to help save millions.

I don't like the idea of living with a failing body but that choice is only temporary. There is really no reason we can't keep you in near perfect shape until an accident gets you. We are also getting better at neural interfacing. I full expect to rid myself of all biological components except my brain and put it in a robot body until we develop the technology to upgrade the brain also.

There are too many interesting problems in the world to want to die.

Lead has very high density and very little hardness.

There are nano polymers which are VERY hard and have density just slightly higher than air.

What I find strange is my MATLAB simulation run about 15% faster in Windows 8.1 vs Windows 7 on the same machine. Now Windows 8.1 runs at almost the exact same speed as MATLAB does under Linux. I don't know about all the other stuff MS did to windows but they did manager to make it faster and unlike Linux I get longer battery life under windows and it still hibernates correctly.

On linux after I installed the intel thermald and p-state stuff according to the directions I found from intel the linux side did get MUCH better battery life than I had been getting before but still worse than windows.

In my case though these calculations will save millions of lives and improve the qualify of life for many millions more. Even the most powerful super computers in the world would take years to solve many of these problems and we keep finding more to solve. We approximate solutions because that is still better than we had before and it is the best we can do for now.

With more computing power we can save more lives.

If I had a computer that was a million times faster than my current computer I could still use something even faster. Even at a billion times faster I could still use more power. We are at the stage where we can use computer simulations to help bring drugs to market. The computational power needed is HUGE but it is also helping bring drugs (including CURES) to market that would have never been possible otherwise. There are even potential cancer cures that will NOT make it to market ANY other way.

The average person may not need more computing power but as a species we desperately need insanely more computing power than we have now.

Very powerful computers though are useful. Right now it takes nearly 10 years and a billion dollars to bring a new drug to market. A lot of work is just figuring out how the heck to make a drug at an industrial level since you can't just scale up lab techniques. With large computer systems we are just now learning how to figure out these settings without doing experiments. This kind of computing power is being used to save thousands of lives every year and our technology is growing very rapidly but it is very processing intensive.

I know it does not make the news and you don't see much in the way of articles about it. Figuring out how to make a cancer drug just does not have the same kind of buzz as cat videos. However, don't forget that we are doing useful stuff also and even though it takes a while to see the results you will see them.

It is complex but antibacterial soaps do make the problem worse.

The first line of defense your body has against foreign bacteria is not your immune system it is your own bacteria. When you wipe out them you create vulnerabilities in the system. Most antibiotic strains of bacteria don't survive very well compared to the non-antibiotic strains if no antibiotics are present. The same is true for many other resistance.

What this means is don't take things to an extreme. After you go to the bathroom you should wash your hands and if you get a cut you should clean it and seal it. However the constant usage of stuff like purell and putting it all over you in a bad idea. It also means that you should not take antibiotics unless you actually need them since they do wipe out a lot of your necessary bacteria also and can upset the balance of bacterial species within you. Basically we keep all those bacteria in check by making sure they are all in controlled numbers and use the balance between each of them to keep them in check. Your body is actually pretty darn good at this and even if you upset the system it will still usually repair it just fine.

In the end the message is don't take this stuff to extremes.

You should look at something called iGEM. Genetic engineering is really not that hard to do. I have done it in a competition and my team did very well. Teams have been genetically engineering all kinds of useful things to make the world a better place. Everything from sensor systems that require no power and glow if they detect dangerous substances in the water to bacteria that can biodegrade plastics. A German team even genetically engineered some plants to clean up pharmaceuticals in the water supply.

What it comes down to is that all genes are basically compatible across species (more or less). We can take color proteins from sea creatures and put them in flowers or bacteria or mammals and they work fine. We can take human protein coding sequences and place them in other things to grow those proteins for us. It is pretty impressive. Genetic engineering is pretty much like legos. It is really not that hard to do.

Just labeling something as GMO or not doesn't tell you anything. If the labels where actually useful and applied to all foods I could support them. However the labeling laws that keep being proposed for GMO don't do any of that. How do you know if the GMO plant you are eating is genetically engineering with something you don't want vs things like adding higher omega-3 or a more complete protein mixture? It is a useless label.

What we need is a national database of ALL food that has the full specs on every food item. Organic, GMO etc should all have their full DNA sequence, proteins etc on file. I oppose just labeling GMO with a GMO label because it is just a method to spread fear. Some of the pro labeling activists I have talked to even admitted that. They did not want organic foods subjected to the same level of scrutiny. They wanted a GMO label to kill GMO foods because they thought they where bad for the planet. They had NO scientific evidence to back any of those claims up, they just "knew" it.

I am tired of this fake science stuff I am seeing on this planet. It is holding back the species and it is very dangerous.

What you are allergic to is a specific protein sequence. That sequence can arrise form cross breeding, mutations or GMO. What we actually need to do is have a full assay of the product including the DNA sequences of all the items involved. We know what sequence(s) give rise to peanut allergies. What you would do is check off in some cell phone app that you are allergic to peanuts. When you go to the store you would just scan any item and it would say if it is safe or not regardless of what it looks like.

We already have foods that have peanuts in them that are not obvious and if you don't pay attention to the allergy information you may not notice it. A bigger problem is we only call out warnings for a few allergens in food even though we know of hundreds. A unified system would make this easier for everyone. It also means if we identify new food allergens we can update ALL existing foods with that information.

You would be safer than you are now, more informed than you are now and could make better decisions.

Even with organic farming the VAST majority of seeds are bought. A company creates the new organic strain using cross breading, radiation and/or chemical mutation and then sends those seeds out. They end up in the wild exactly as quickly as the GMO versions do since they use the EXACT SAME PROCESS.

Right now the safest approach is no more traditional cross breeding, radiation mutation or chemical mutation and all 3 of those have organic versions that are allowed and used. The safest way we know of to change something in a plant is via genetic engineering. If you want a tomato that is more cold resistant it is better to find a protein that has cold resistance that we already eat and splice just that gene in. The other approaches introduce thousands of other genes and sometimes the result are toxic. However since they are considered traditional methods that is almost never tested and we only find out after people have reacted.

If you really want to be safe you should be doing a protein assay to find out what proteins are in the cells before along with the DNA sequence. Then you require that only targeted insertions are allowed by law. You perform the insertion and then do another assay to verify that all other proteins are there and that the only new one is the one you added. You also verify with DNA sequencing that what you inserted went exactly where you said it would.

It is pretty depressing to see so many people that claim to be pro science but really just seem to be pushing their own personal agenda and trying to use a scientific type process to cover for it.

For some reason right now many consider organic to be some kind of health shield that nothing can penetrate and anything with that label is always good for you. It is not based on anything rational and should definitely be studied carefully also. One of the problems we keep having with organic is the use of natural fertilizers that end up causing ecoli contamination. It is something that should not be happening since we know how to prevent it and even though we have had many people die from it there seems to be no effort to actually clean it up.

When looking at the health of a food we need to consider the long term health impacts to those that eat it, those that grow it, and the ecosystem that surrounds it.

If you think that GMOs should be studied in this way then ALL other foods that are modified in ANY way should be studied EXACTLY the same way. It doesn't matter if it was done with traditional cross breeding, gene insertion, mutation via radiation or mutation via chemical mutagen. However whenever I hear people saying we need to study this stuff they ONLY refer to the second one. The other 3 can all be done "organically" are far more dangerous, have had known problems, are far more likely to have side effects and are NOT the ones people are saying we need to study more carefully.

I do think food should be studied more carefully but if you single out only one type of food and give the other types a free pass that is not actually doing any real science. That is trying to sound scientific to back up your own biases.

Do you know what in ireland they actually developed a potato that was genetically engineered from a wild variant that was resistant to blight? However ANTI GMO groups effectively got that forbidden for usage. Instead we use the normal "organic" approach of controlling the blights. We spray heavy metals on the potatoes. We know 100% those are bad for you and we know that they end up concentrating in the potatoes. Now I doubt anyone could ever eat enough potatoes for that to be a problem but we developed a better potato that required none of that stuff. We would have also not had humans exposed to the heavy metals either.

If you want to scrutinize GMO you should be for scrutinizing all food. I don't care if you use genetic engineering, traditional cross breading, organic radiation mutation or organic chemical mutation they should ALL be checked. However saying that only the genetic engineering approach should face higher scrutiny is idiotic.