Are you kidding me? So if I were to follow you around everywhere you went doing this twenty four/seven you wouldn't want access to legal recourse? There is a point at which constant aggressive targeted pestering becomes an infringement of someones right to live without being driven mad by someone being a dick to them. Anti-harassment laws are there to stop people having to resort to violent means / being bullied into a state of extreme distress when some douchebag decides to make it their life's work to make one other person's life a misery.

Bear in mind that stalking is a form of harassment. Psychological bullying is a form of harassment. Short of condoning physical violence, how else would you deal with that kind of problem?

Actually, harassment is an infringement upon a mourner's rights. It is repetitive behaviour intended to threaten or offend. Just because it's done to different groups of people doesn't make it any less harassment.

In fact, the Patriot Guard Riders mentioned above, who have been at many such events, should be within their rights to take WBC to court armed with the list of names just published and get a restraining order preventing them from going within a half mile of a churchyard or funeral.

That way if they try to pull this crap again they can be (legally) locked up. And hopefully anally raped.

The Kindle may be book-sized, but the size of a Kindle screen is smaller than a standard (A5?) book page, even that of the touchscreen Kindle. Instead of giving it more screen space and keeping it book-sized, they basically cut off the keyboard and made it a smaller-than-book-page size.

I had a Kindle with a keyboard bought for me as a gift. I would never have bought a Kindle for myself because the screen is irritatingly small. Hopefully now that the 10-inch tablet market is taking off they'll get a clue and release a touch version of the DX (and in the UK) or even better, a book-sized Kindle that's all screen, not the poxy 6-inch piece of crap consumers are subjected to at the moment.

Nope, the treatment does the opposite. There are two main types of lymphocyte involved here, antibody-producing B-cells, and 'killler' T-cells that can directly kill cells. The cancer is formed of B-cells that are proliferating out of control (though there are also normal B-cells about). Researchers remove T-cells from the body, 'arm' the T-cells against B-cells by introducing a new receptor which latches onto a protein on the cell surface of ALL B-cells, then stick them back in the body. They then kill ALL the patient's B-cells, the leukaemia and the normal cells.

It kills the cancer, but also one whole branch of the immune system. The patient is then dependent on getting antibodies injected for the rest of their lives, or they are susceptible to all sorts of disease.

This is a breakthrough, but the cure comes at a large cost as the loss of your B-cells could be permanent (the T-cells may persist in your body forever, continually killing new B-cells). Right now the treatment is a bit like swallowing a spider to catch a fly, but I'm sure they'll find a way to program these T-cells so that they can be treated with a drug and they will self-destruct. The technology exists, and I'm frankly amazed they haven't used it, it's a very small step that could make a huge difference for their patients.

You mean replication fork. "PCR fork" is not a meaningful term. PCR is an artificial way to replicate DNA, and is very different to, and much less complicated than, in vivo (in the cell) DNA replication.

You're right, though, this is not the first time they've visualised DNA. It may be the first time they've visualised it using electron microscopy at a resolution that means you can actually see what its fine structure looks like, instead of it looking like a smooth line, but we already had a good idea what the structure looked like from X-ray crystallography.

X-ray crystallography is an indirect method that gets its data from a massive crystal made of repeated molecules of DNA which is hence in a pretty unnatural state. The question is whether or not this new method is any better. Is the central bit of DNA in any less unnatural a state if it's stuck between 6 other helices, than if it were stuck in the middle of millions? It is possible to make crystals of DNA in the A-form (the ones in this paper are in the A-form, so are the same as what we've already seen from X-ray crystallography) so I'd say that this isn't that exciting a new technique, but this paper is in a pretty high impact journal, so maybe I'm missing something.

They already have a visual confirmation of DNA replication, obtained by transmission electron microscopy again.

Google "replication fork TEM" for some images. You have to prep DNA from cells, you can't see it happening inside cells, but it's very strong visual evidence of how replication happens.

There's also a cool visualisation method that allows you to see new DNA being laid down during replication using confocal (laser) microscopy. The way it works is: they feed an artificial version of a DNA base to cells during replication, then stop, and swap the first one out with a different artificial DNA base analogue to see the new DNA being made after the point that you change analogues. They then use fluorescently labelled antibodies to detect both types of bases, using (for e.g.) a red-labelled one for the first period of replication, and a green labelled one for the second period.

This is a good explanation. It can be used for some awesome experiments - here's an example from the same lab (Fig. 3).

So what the summary should have said is:
They are adding value by "making sure the drivers work", and potentially (though it's not explicitly stated) funding/providing developers for two community software projects:

That appears to be the extent of the added value. I'm not sure I'd pay an extra $100 for it versus installing ubuntu myself (assuming OS-free hardware is minus $50 for the windows tax), but good on them anyway.

The article is paywalled, but I expect they remove the genes that make the virus able to replicate, while leaving in the genes that make it able to reinitiate production of viral proteins after a long period of dormancy. This would normally make a load more virus, but if you've removed the viral polymerase gene (as one example) it won't be able to make new viral genomes to package into new virus particles and therefore won't be infective. There's a fair chance it might not even be able to assemble into a functioning virus properly. However, it will/can make a flood of viral proteins in the cell, and these get processed and presented to the immune system, leading to an immune response.

I am not an immunologist, but what I'd be worried about with these vaccines is that if viral protein is made, but not enough of it to lead to serious distress in the cell/ to inflammation in the host, the "immune response" that's provoked might be tolerance of viral protein because your immune system interprets it as being a protein from your own body (which are presented to the immune system in the same way). This would mean that if you get infected by the real virus, your adaptive immune response wouldn't work, and it could be very bad news for you indeed.

I personally wouldn't touch these vaccines with a ten-foot pole.

I thought "Their" was the gender non-specific pronoun. If it weren't for that "who", it'd be the right word to use here.

Limited Gov. and Anarcho- are not the only type(s) of libertarian, just the most vocal - one is "libertarian right" - economically conservative, socially liberal on the polical compass. The other I have no idea - probably leftist, in the sense that they're cooperative.

I know it doesn't fit in with the Libertarian party's ideals in the US, but there is also a left-leaning type who can recognise the importance of a powerful, supportive, socialist (in the sense of being 'for the people') state and the freedom - that's right, I said freedom - that it gives to its citizens.

Freedom from disease through socialised medicine, sewerage and water treatment, freedom to travel through collective payment for roads, freedom from the aggression of other individuals who would seek to take what is yours, etc. These are the aspects of government worth paying for, and they are on the political left vs. politcal right, X-axis of the graph. It's a choice between the freedom to choose not to boil your water, get cholera and die versus the freedom from having to worry about it. And while some people don't appreciate that a good proportion of the taxes that they pay are being put towards buying them the freedom from having to constantly worry about where their next meal is coming from, or the freedom from having to walk 12 miles to the well and back every day on a dirt track to get it (or conversely to have to pay exhorbitant fees to use a decent road), others appreciate this second type of freedom.

You can object to the aspects of governments that take away your individual liberties - the right to to whatever the hell you want as long as it doesn't impact on other people - while still approving of those aspects of government which provide a collective good much cheaper than any commercial entity would. That would make you a left-leaning libertarian, and although US big "L" Libertarianism doesn't want anything to do with them, they do exist. Maybe this is what the OP was talking about (albeit he's very ignorant if he thinks all Libertarians approve of paying taxes!)

Interesting you should say that. Cos (from TFA) one of the people sampling bacteria from around the coastlines of the US and South America is Craig Venter, the bloke who led the effort to sequence and privatise the human genome. So yeah, at least one person IS trying to do exactly that.

Except that their problems are directly caused by the cheapness and abundance of subsidised food in the West. We grow a huge surplus to guarantee we won't ever starve, fund that from other areas of our economies, drive the cost of food down everywhere, and this means farmers in the third world can't afford to compete.

We've created the circumstances. Perpetual aid is one way of taking responsibility for screwing up their food production. It's not fair too perpetuate their dependence, but cutting food aid won't help the problem. The problem is cheap subsidised food production in the West.

== these problems are pandemic.

FTFY like a grammar nazi :P

So you're somewhere in the green area on this, then?

It's not necessarily horrible, as Wiley may be using profits from US sales to allow them to subsidise prices in third world countries so that people can get their books who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford them.

However, it's an object. If you choose to trade it at a certain price, it's no business of yours what happens to it from there. As long as US import duty gets paid, there is zero reason that Wiley should even have a case.