I've already got binoculars and a sheet of paper's pretty cheap. To me this looks like a good excuse to buy a welder's hood with #14 glass (as per the link in TFA). Once I've got the hood, that's an excuse to buy the torch...and presto! A new hobby is born!

OK, a welder's hood can be pricey. But you can buy the glass for less than $10.

Obama has issued a veto threat.

"...the universities have the money..."

Damn it you made me laugh so hard I nearly pissed myself.

Seriously though American universities are falling apart, salaries low, temporary and part-time positions (full time responsibilities for half pay! Yay!) are ever increasingly common, buildings in dire need of replacement, over $25 billion in deferred maintenance (ever have a ceiling cave in on you? I have. Not fun.), and university libraries everywhere have been slashing their journal subscriptions for years because they cost too much. Public funding of American universities has been slashed repeatedly over the last 30 years. A state university used to get 80% of its funds from the state. Now a state university usually gets around 20%, but some get single-digit support making them private schools in all but name. This is the cause of sky high tuition. Every time a state slashes university funding, tuition increases.

"That's the rub though- vaccines used to be for life threatening diseases like polio and smallpox but are now more and more prescribed for things that are merely a nuisance(chicken pox anyone?)."

Chicken pox vaccination is still worthwhile. From the link, before introduction of a vaccine chicken pox was annually responsible for 150 deaths, 11,000 hospitalizations, $330 million medical costs, and $1.5 billion in societal costs. Further the virus can later (even decades after initial infection) cause shingles, which typically involves a painful skin rash lasting several weeks but can also cause residual nerve pain lasting months or even years. Shingles is pretty common too, I found incidence rates of 2-3 per thousand per year, and you're at increased risk of developing shingles as you get older. Additionally you can have shingles more than once.

I have a hard time believing it's as good as your link says. Thinking about the funding opportunities I applied for in the last three years I'd say the funding success rate in my experience is much closer to 8% than 18%. I can think of two grants I wrote (one NIH, one USDA) where the success rate ended up less than 5%. If we went back to the 30% success rate of 2003 I'd be dancing buck-naked on top of the lab benches...so I guess there's an upside to the abysmal funding since nobody wants to see that.

Some of my work is referenced by wikipedia (just like a lot of other researchers) but it doesn't mean much of anything to me professionally. A wikipedia reference doesn't add on to the total number of citations a paper I wrote gets, only citations by other peer-reviewed papers does that. I doubt references on wikipedia gets me much in the way of other researchers' eyeballs on my papers either.

Maybe more in terms of TFA, I'm a biochemist and on the last paper I wrote I got the opposite pushback from the reviewers. They thought I had too many references for the length of the paper and asked me to try and cut it down if possible, but made no specific requests as to which references to remove or how many. So if I had more than one reference backing a statement I'd pick the more recent one, or use a review and add on "and references therein," pretty common stuff. I've never heard of a problem in my field of not getting past review due to not referencing prof smith or whoever. You might (rarely) get a reviewer's request for some statement to have a reference, but the reviewers don't care who you cite as long as it backs up the statement.

"The article explains NOTHING about how dangerous 2,3,4-T is, and simply replies upon "it's a part of Agent Orange" to assert the harmfulness of the chemical."

Well according to almighty wikipedia the oral LD50 of 2,4,5-T is 389 mg/kg in mice and 500 mg/kg in rats. That struck me as not being especially hideous, and on a whim I looked up the LD50 of aspirin: 250 mg/kg in mice and 200 mg/kg in rats. By this measure 2,4,5-T is less toxic than aspirin!. It's more complex than that however. It doesn't include low dose/persistent exposure effects of the compound and doesn't include degradation products or side products of synthesis, which could have different levels of toxicity. It's the synthesis byproducts that are a major issue with 2,4,5-T. As others have commented on, 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin (TCDD) is a side product of synthesis, and according to wikipedia modern synthesis can knock its levels down to about 0.005 ppm (I've seen 0.1 ppm elsewhere in my quick search), but in earlier batches could be up to 60 ppm. The LD50 of TCDD is 1,000 times lower than 2,4,5-T; a few hundred micrograms ingested per kilogram of body weight was enough to kill rats (sorry about age of study). Nasty effects other than death naturally occur at lower amounts. Also keep in mind that we're just making rodents eat the stuff. I'm not a chemical engineer, but you do have to wonder what sort of waste products (TCDD included) were flushed out by that chemical plant and where it went, and how long TCDD and other nasties might persist in the environment. TCDD is unfortunately pretty resistant to biodegradation, one study in Italy I found gave a half-life in soil of 9.1 years. I've just spent a little bit of time working on insecticide development so these are some of the things I think about, although being a biochemist this is not a core area of expertise.

I can think of the SR-71, the A-12, YF-12 (although these three aircraft are related), and the XB-70 Valkyrie. If we include rocket powered aircraft that are launched from the air then there's the X-2, although the only one that made Mach 3 crashed shortly afterwards, and the X-15. Including the MiG-25 that's seven, but three are related, two can't really handle it, two are rocket-powered and require motherships, and four were experimental/prototypes. That leaves the SR-71 and its parent the A-12.

There might be a chance of 4,000 kph, but yeah 4,000 mph (6,437 kph) doesn't sound reasonable. 3,530 kph is the declassified SR-71 speed record but its true top speed remains classified.

Universities and other publicly-funded research institutions perform basic research for the most part. We study disease X, and find targets Y and Z that might be exploited for drug discovery by pharmaceutical companies. Starting about 10 years ago, a few of the largest universities started small high-throughput screening labs where university researchers could learn how to do some of the screening work done in the private sector. I've used one such facility at the University of Wisconsin. However the number of compounds available for screening is at least an order of magnitude smaller than what is available to pharmaceutical companies. More important than the number of compounds available for testing is the funds to do it. Pharma has it, academia doesn't.

Even in the rare cases where the universities do come up with something that shows efficacy, that doesn't necessarily make it a good compound. How well does it inhibit? How easy is it to make? How stable is it? How soluble is it? What else does the compound inhibit? Does it show undesirable side effects? How easy is it to formulate? Modification of lead compounds is pretty much the middle third of drug discovery, and can take three years or more. Some universities have medicinal chemists, but at least in my experience they do not have time, interest (running their own labs they've naturally got their own projects and interests), personnel, or funds to take a compound discovered at a different lab and work it over for a few years. Even if they did, no university has the funds to get a compound through clinical trials.

Biotech and pharmaceuticals companies fund all the phase I, II, and III clinical trials. The amount of time and money spent on compound modification by biotech and pharma dwarfs the universities, to put it mildly. The same is true for the time and money spent on screening chemical libraries and preclinical trials. Biotech and pharma also have involvement in the very earliest stage of target identification and verification. Universities are important in the drug discovery process. They provide some of the targets, do the vast majority of the basic research needed before you can even tease out a target, and provide all of the early (BS/MS/PhD) and most of the middle (postdoctoral) training of the personnel that biotech and pharma need. But for the majority of drug or drug candidate the bulk of the time and money spent is from biotech and pharmaceuticals companies, not the universities.

"Anything that is trivial to reverse engineer and steal in such a manner probably didn't require that much R&D and isn't worth a patent, certainly for the length of time current patents grant a monopoly."

Once a new drug is on the market its exact formulation is known, so reverse engineering is a trivial matter. However the required R&D for a new drug is typically around 10 years and $1 billion.