May be he is not a dingo after all.

Whoever put together their web site forgot the <Irony> tag. Otherwise it is hard to explain how a site calling itself "Reason" so blatantly demonstrates complete lack of the stuff.

First of all, this is an amazing study. How surprising is that we can live without certain genes? Not that surprising. We have done numerous experiments where we have knocked out genes in mice and other organisms and they do just fine. There is no reason why it should be any different in humans. Keep in mind that these variations in the sequence are predicted to disable the gene, but not verified to do so. For example variants that introduce stop codons in the middle of a gene are typically predicted to disable the gene. However this is not always the case. Sometimes the piece of the gene that has the stop codon gets spliced out and the gene can still produce a functional albeit shorter protein. What is needed now is some experimental evidence showing what fraction of these genes are fully disabled.

I second this. Put 50% of any political contribution into a fund and then distribute it to those who vote. That will raise voter participation and reduce the influence of money in politics.

Pass mandatory voting law, and you can be guaranteed that nobody who voted for the law in congress will ever be reelected again. This could be fresh start.

How about you read the entire article and not quote selectively. One major issue is the raw data from clinical studies. In these studies the data identifying the patients is protected to preserve the privacy. The reason for this is that publishing data that identifies the subjects of the study will deter participation, particularly from people with severe conditions. This will ultimately bias the results and will make the studies irrelevant. There is also the existing legislation protecting the patient privacy which prohibits publishing personally identifiable information without explicit consent from the patients. The law that is being proposed will make it impossible to use epidemiological data from medical records. It is pretty obvious that the goal of this legislature is not to enforce "common sense". The goal is to make EPA powerless by preventing it from backing its decisions with real data. The most telling part is that the legislature will quote: "bar academic scientists on the panels from talking about matters related to research they’re doing." WTF? How is EPA supposed to make decisions? By ignoring the advice of scientist who work on the matter and taking advice from people who are completely clueless?

Used to be that in a democracy we will weight the facts and then vote on a decision. Now it seems we live in a Yakov Smirnoff joke were we make the decision and then vote on the facts. Except it is not Soviet Russia...

That's what is known as "get in jail free card".

I switched to them couple of years back when Intuit decided that it will not allow web browsers running linux to the online version of TurboTax. Beats me why they did it. It worked perfectly the previous years. Anyway, TaxAct is cheaper and does the job just as well.

You are making a very good point. Currently antibiotic resistance is a serious problem, mostly because we are very slow in discovering new antibiotics. What is very exciting about this research is that it significantly shifts the odds in our favor by allowing very large scale screens for new antibiotics. It will allow us to outpace the rate of resistance development. The probability that a particular infection will be resistant to multiple different antibiotics drops exponentially with the number of antibiotics you have. If you have a tool chest of 5-6 antibiotics sooner or later you will have pathogens that are resistant to a significant proportion of these antibiotics. Make the tool chest 10 times larger, and you will have a lot less to worry about.

You didn't read the paywalled article, did you?

The antibiotic blocks the bacterial cell wall synthesis. Animals don't have this particular cellular component, so the drug is essentially inactive against humans. This was shown by doing tests on mice. There is the possibility that the drug may elicit allergic response in humans (penicillin often does), but this will be tested in clinical trials.

The more exciting part of the work that did not get any mention in the summaries is how they found the antibiotic. They developed an approach to grow on a large scale microorganisms that were previously impossible to culture in lab conditions. They capture the microorganisms on a chip and then put the chip back into the environment from which the samples was isolated. This means that they did not need to guess what kind of nutrients each microorganism will need (they tested ~10,000 different microbes). The approach allowed them to grow 50 fold more microorganisms compared to what was possible using the current state of the art. To me this is the big news, because antibiotic discovery has been limited by our ability to grow microorganisms in the lab.

I am guessing that the official conclusion will be used to shield the Sony execs from responsibility for their poor security practices.

Ah, the unsubstantiated assertions ... The pile of bad links to unrelated hacks by Iran, Russia and China ... Where have I seen that before? Wasn't that a part of preparing the public opinion to some other war? BTW, why isn't the fact that Sony's IT security was simply laughable not front page in NYT? They even have their CIO talking obvious nonsense on in an interview titled Your guide to good enough compliance. And we are not talking any sophisticated stuff here. Just basic things like changing you password and not keeping a file titled "passwords" on your hard rive.