I've read a number of your comments in this story, and I understand your thoughts and frustrations. I'm curious, though: why are you jumping to violence? Why not try to affect change through the system? I would preemptively guess your response to be something along the lines of, "the system is broken beyond repair," or "the system is rigged to prevent those who aren't part of the elite from getting in and making change." But is it true? I hear a lot of people complaining about politicians and corruption in the system, yet very few seem willing to challenge them by taking up the job themselves.

Yes, I'm very well aware that politics these days seems to favor the wealthy, or those with preexisting ties to the political world. It's probably why we have career politicians and political families. Despite that, nobody seems to even try.

Why not try it? Start a new political party, or even a loosely-organized politically-motivated organization. Start by taking on government at the local levels, and then move upward. Sure, it'll be difficult - difficult to outlast the established political organizations; difficult to keep your party united; difficult to bear the various expectations of the population you serve; and difficult to accomplish your goals with the limited power of what ever office you and your colleagues hold. Those are the limitations of the system.

However, you're saying that you would be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, yet you would not be willing to try and work through the system? How can you and others like you declare the system to be broken, when you have not tried to work through it yourself?

While that may be true, why did Wikileaks put them out there? I've always thought of Wikileaks as a way for internal sources to provide information that would reveal corruption or otherwise disturbing activities within organizations. Releasing this list just seems like pointless antagonism, or a sort of bragging to show what information they have.

I like Wikileaks, but this makes me question whether they've dropped their original ideal (or if it was never theirs, then the ideal that they could have been). Looking back, what purpose did leaking the diplomatic cables serve? We were given a glimpse into the inner thoughts of diplomats, but no hard evidence of corruption or misbehavior was revealed. Was the point really just embarrassment?

The reason why many cancers return after their initial removal has to do with cancer cell types. Previously it was believed that cancer was cancer and all cells were the same, but it is now believed that there are "cancer stem cells." These are cells that bud off into the fast-growing cells that make up tumors, but by comparison the stem cells are slow-dividing and may not fully resemble the tumor cells.

The reason why this is important is because many therapies are designed to target fast-dividing cells. Cells are most vulnerable to treatments (whether chemical or radiation) when they're actively replicating. Chemotherapy does a number on your entire body, but it hits the cancer cells a bit harder because they're dividing even faster. However, even if you clear out a tumor, remission may still occur if the cancer stem cells weren't taken out, as well. And due to their slow-dividing nature, many therapies that we're currently utilizing are likely missing them.

I've never heard of the theory that you mentioned. It seems very unlikely that cancers are intentionally brought about by the body, given that we have essentially no examples of cancers being beneficial, and from what we know of cellular biology there are many, many factors designed to guard against cells becoming cancerous.

I'm a graduate student in immunology research, so when I first read this over I immediately began to think about how I could use it in my own research. I can think of quite a few applications.

I won't go into the details of my project (that'd be a few paragraphs right there and I'd lose people's attention), but it's heavily based on cell signaling. In a molecular biology course you were probably exposed to the fact that cells have a whole lot going on inside of them - various receptors trigger various proteins; those proteins alter other proteins (either activating them or shutting them off); proteins can trigger transcription factors, which go to the DNA and influence the protein field... and so on. It can get pretty complicated, but it's like a big puzzle. Pretty fun, as long as your experiments are working properly and you're not in 100% uncharted territory!

The standard way that people map cell signaling pathways is by using inhibitors and stimulators. Generally this means that you want a drug that has a very high specificity, a known target, and a known function. By treating the cell with that drug, you affect one part of the pathway and try to determine what happens to other parts of the signaling pathway. You determine the relationships in that manner. (siRNA is increasingly becoming a standard for "knocking down" targets, as well.)

But how do you get a drug or siRNA plasmid into a cell? With drugs you generally have to culture the cells with them right up to the limit where it's toxic to the cells; with siRNA you need to package it into viruses and then infect your cells (infection rates generally aren't so hot - you could also do electroporesis, but that's a bit stress on the cells). Assuming I'm understanding the reality of the nanotubes correctly and am not totally off in a daydream, this would let you bypass a lot of those concerns and just get your products into the cells pretty easily. I'm not sure what the efficiency of this method would be, but it could be promising.

Just as a disclaimer to any other biologists reading this, I work with primary cells and our cells of interest occur in very low numbers (hence low infection rates and/or methods that stress and kill off large numbers of our cells are very undesirable). People who work with cell lines have it easy! =)

Performance-wise, not really. Windows 7 hasn't been any faster for me than XP under VMWare Fusion (but perhaps that's obvious; Windows XP would probably seem slower than WIndows 98, as well). It hasn't been noticeably slower, though. I'm attempting to transition to it as my primary Windows VM at the moment as I'd prefer the security benefits. I probably won't feel completely comfortable doing so until the cost of acquiring 8 GB of RAM (laptop form) is around half of what it is now; even with 4 GB I'm experiencing many more page outs than I'd like. I ran my XP VM set to 768 MB of RAM; 7, like Vista, seems happier with 1024 allocated.

The prices are significantly reduced on "outdated" models, but the Apple store doesn't make them known (and they may not even sell them directly). For example, when my fiancee's HP laptop started to give her problems, we priced out Macbook replacements. A black Macbook - considered the "high end" Macbook back before they started making them in aluminum - would cost close to $1500 new (at least, that's how much the university was selling it at). However, my university bookstore made the prices of "old" units known. These were the units that were one or two "refreshes" old. We picked out a black Macbook for her for $850. It may not have been the absolute latest and greatest that Apple had to offer, but it was less than a year old and as such its specifications still blew away Apple's newly refreshed, lower-end Macbooks by quite a bit.

Apple's student discounts have to go through their website, or so the bookstore had told me, so the prices I'm giving you should not reflect prices after a student discount. It's possible that a university bookstore would discount "old stock" more steeply than other vendors would. It's still something to consider, and if you can find a store that sells Apple computers then you may want to ask if they carry discounted old stock.

Actually, if you calculate it out the 4/3 sensor should be able to be brought to 25 (24 effective) megapixels. Reference: http://www.wrotniak.net/photo/43/sensor-size.html

In a further showing that 12 megapixels is not the upper limit, Panasonic (the supplier of the 4/3 sensor type that Olympus uses) has apparently upped the megapixels to 14 and will be releasing their next DSLR based on that sensor. After making a big stir with his statement about how 12 megapixels was going to be the norm for a while, that'd make Watanabe look a bit silly, as Olympus will undoubtedly find themselves using that sensor in their newer cameras as well.

I think it's too early to say whether or not Olympus can compete in the megapixel race. Technology is constantly changing and moving forward. You'd also likely be right to say that the megapixel race isn't benefitting Olympus. Watanabe isn't wrong in attempting to refocus on what really matters (or rather, what people should realize really matters) at the consumer level. The truth is that the average consumer gauges a camera's quality by the number of megapixels that it has, and even the "pro" gearheads tend to gauge a camera by the size of its sensor (which, based on samples I've seen with my own eyes, is really exaggerated). I use an Olympus (you probably figured it out by now), and it's a bit frustrating to be met by the Nikon/Canon users who dismiss you outright because of the size of the sensor in your camera. Nobody likes to be dismissed like that, and it's also frustrating because it's almost like these people just buy into marketing and don't even think about where they're spending their money, nor why.

Actually, it's too early to say that DNA isn't everything. Identical twins may share the same DNA, but the expression of that DNA will not be identical. This is what the field of epigenetics is all about. Knowing the sequence of DNA does not tell you how it is expressed - you'd need to look into epigenetic factors (associated proteins and "markers") for that. It also seems that many epigenetic factors are not hereditary, either, but are instead essentially randomized.

Despite epigenetics, I agree with you that DNA alone is not everything. External factors and stimulus will alter your genetic expression as well as your brain development. Right now the variables of DNA sequence, epigenetic factors, and environmental stimulus are a bit too much for us to process. I don't think it's unrealistic to say that we may one day be able to predict what combinations of each would impact a person's development. In some ways that's an exciting prospect; in other ways, it's Brave New World come to life. I have mixed feelings about that prospect.