You realize that lowering your blood sugar by whatever means will not cause you to loose weight? Rather, your body will have a more of a tendency to go into the "survival mode" where it will hold on to any of the fat that you have and as soon as you eat all nutrients will be stored for your own good. Not to mention feeling of fatigue and hunger caused by the low blood sugar.

This concept and its outcomes were nicely explored in the story "King of Pain" by Jacek Dukaj. (I think English translations of the Polish original are already available).

Basically, when every nut and terrorist is able to brew a super-plague, the outcome is dissolution of all forms of government, which simply must cave in to the demands or face genocide. This results in formations of small anarchy states. No larger govt. structures exist, since even if terrorists' demands are met, they become well known and hence they can become the targets themselves and the vicious cycle continues.

"A genetic study showed that new virus strain presented five mutations, and all could be also observed in nature - but only separately, not all five combined."
With this sentence, they have practically gave it away already. All one has to do now is to scan the scientific literature for the appropriate five mutations that confer increased airborne transmissibility, perform site directed mutagenesis and voila.

They should follow the footsteps of Australian researches (who inserted IL4 gene into the mousepox creating a very lethal strain) and publish this anyway.

Not to mention, she can be regarded as a first truly genetically immortal human being in a sense of her cells (or whatever is left of her original DNA given that these cells have been passaged so many times). Someone here has once mentioned her mass if they put together all cells from all the labs in the world. I recall it was ranging into tonnes..

People oppose the nuclear power because they are fed over-exaggerated headlines by sensation seeking media. "We are facing the next Chernobyl! BOOM!!!" is going to generate many more views than "Humanitarian crisis in Japan caused by widespread flooding."

Typical human behavior... Always resorting to violence.

"the 6990 'punches all other GPUs in the nuts." ...and steals your wallet at the same time. Aside from the epeen factor, realistically which currently available games require such a hardware. AFAIK, all the currently released games (e.g. Bulletstorm) run comfortably on the Nvidia 260, 280 cards at the highest settings (1920x1080 resolution) So a simple question, why bother...

I can encrypt on my own and Gmail already does a fine job removing spam. I don't need a Government oversight and much less a possibility of paying per message for this "privilege".

"...In any immunology textbook you will read that once a virus makes it into a cell, that is game over because the cell is now infected. At that point there is nothing the immune response can do other than kill that cell,..."

What a load of crap. Cells have a plenty of methods to fight virus infections. For example viral RNA silencing or interferon alpha/beta response. Moreover, killing of the infected cells is also a viable immune strategy.
So it is not a game over... In addition, where is the link to the original publication? (article or it didn't happen!)

As much as Id like to believe all these new and wonderful technologies, I wouldn't underestimate the ability of human beings to inflict a grevious harm on themeselves in the most creative ways. You may have the zero-fatality car but the guy plowing into you head first might not and the result would most likely be just as fatal. OTOH, every bit of safety counts.

I fail to see the hype. There are plenty of great anti-HIV antibodies which are well described. These have a great cross-reactivity to many HIV strains and are directed against very conserved regions of envelope proteins. The trouble lies that no one so far has been able to find a way to produce them in a patient's body in large amounts. In addition, it is well known that Ab response is not really the way to go. Current HIV vaccines designs are moving towards inducing a innate immunity responses and also focus on T-cell not B-cell mediated immunity.

I would kind of doubt that. The ability to easily swap hardware in a full desktop rig will trump laptops any time. Moreover, desktops usually offer more powerful hardware options.

Unfortunately, it seems that even if God almighty would have stepped down and told Mr. Conroy that filtering of this sort is a bad idea i wouldn't have helped much. However, keep up the pressure and they will relent (do not look at NZ!).

IP is going to be the foundation of any future economy.

IP is just various monopoly rights. See the former Soviet union on how well monopolies work. Monopolies are antithetical to an effective economy and thus will not be a foundation, but a burden.

it'll be up to our inventions and our software and our innovation in exporting ideas

Please. IP is mainly good for extracting resources out of an economy, it has nothing to do with 'exporting'. Implementing IP laws is a net loss for any economy, and most of the time (certainly in the case of the US), the monopoly rights will be held by foreign corporations.

The only way forward is to make western economies competitive again. Repealing at the very least copyright and patents would be a good start towards reestablishing a highly competitive free market and lowering the burden on western labour (thus reducing their price).

Well, we will still leave our immune system to handle the unknown. However the concept of either enabling a mass and cheap production of specific antibodies against viruses like HIV or transferring the antibody producing B cells into our bodies is certainly interesting. I was under the impression that his was not done earlier mainly due to the prohibitive costs of treating everyone this way. Given that there is still no effective vaccine this may actually become viable prevention or treatment option.