We had our proximity card access system completely shit the bed on the 31st. Don't know if it was a leap year issue or if it was just coincidence, but it caused widespread outages and was a major PITA.

Yes. Actually if you read the report, towards the end they conclude that the main cause of death was a failure to place their seat backs and tray tables in the upright position.

Depends on the pathogen. Things like smallpox, sars, or ebola are not going to be easy to come by, while something like influenza and the information to recreate Spanish flu would be. But that was kind of what I was getting at in my last point. Someone could easily start cloning things into common pathogens, which is not a good idea unless you are doing it in controlled conditions (like a BSL3 lab), but in practice there is no way you can effectively regulate that.

Virtually all academic researchers are required to have approval of a recombinant DNA research advisory committee before they do any kind of work like this. There certainly is a real possibility of someone creating something dangerous, such as a recombinant pathogen which is the very reason why we have those oversight committees in the first place. For example, the article mentions creating tattoos using florescent squid genes, which is vague but I'm assuming the only way that would work would be to make a recombinant virus expressing a GFP-like gene. So you really don't that it might be a bad idea to have people injecting infectious agents into themselves that they brewed up in their garage?

I'm all for regulating this, but realistically there is no way to prevent people from making recombinant human pathogens in their garage while still allowing legitimate educational activities like making GFP-expressing e.coli. So frankly, regulation is pointless beyond what already is in place, such as limiting access to pathogens.

The US is still by far the largest manufacturing economy in the world. In fact, it's almost as large as the next 2 countries (China and Japan) combined:

2007 stats in USD:
US: 1.8 trillion
China: 1.1 trillion
Japan: 0.9 trillion

http://unstats.un.org/unsd/snaama/dnllist.asp

Shenanigans. I was just curious about your animals as a reservoir host, so I check the first few that came to mind. Measles, mumps rubella, and polio are all caused by human-specific pathogens that don't have any other natural hosts.

Probably not, because those fuckers are always at Red Lobster wearing mixed fabric clothing.

Flagship demo projects like this often get exceedingly big discounts from the vendors.

Yeah, remember Virginia Tech's crazy Mac cluster that had a a slew of Power G5s that they ran for what seemed like less than a year and replaced with XServes? IIRC, Apple gave them an even swap for the brand new XServes.

No, you were right. The ENCODE group published a paper last year claiming that virtually all of the genome is transcribed (ENCODE Project Consortium in Nature, 2007). While it's an interesting observation that is probably true, the question is what does that really mean? Unlike translation which is a deterministic process (e.g. the codon AAA will always code for the amino acid lysine), transcription is a relatively sloppy probabilistic process where the DNA signals to start and stop don't always work properly, so you end up with things like aborted and run-off transcripts. However, the cell has control measures in place to degrade abnormal protein and RNA transcripts. So if you take a snapshot of the cell at a particular moment, you'll find all of these artifacts that are destined for the genetic dustbin and will never be translated into proteins. Add onto that, that these are relatively rare events, so if you find 1 of these long run-off transcripts in a sea of 50,000 normal ones, does that really matter?

They do have a benefit in that they are believed to occasionally aid in the creation on the elements that control gene expression (promoter and enhancer elements) upstream of genes. So keeping them present does serve an evolutionarily beneficial purpose. However making the claim they *all* of the transposons and repetitive elements in the genome have a purpose is extending that to a point where it is a false statement.