As if my education was not expensive enough, now they throw this out there. America is already rediculously expensive it seems for education, something like this will only make it more so. To make matters worse, I imagine we will be the only ones who pay attention and pay such fees if they come about - thus giving an even greater advantage to those recieving an education elsewhere.

largely tax money? Can I see a reference for this - or are you referring to a specific type of scientist? I see it but not largely so. And I think you mean skimming foreigners not undergrads or are you referring to a specific field of study?

The whole process is incredibly biased to the point it can be argued that large company best interests are often the greater concern for acceptance of a paper versus the quality and significance of the contribution itself – but that is just one issue. Some well known scientists have argued openly with other well known scientists and as a result, their contributions (or labs contributions) have become blacklisted and are never published. This does nothing more than hurt the pursuit of science (and the scientists themselves who reputation is tied to publications) since the community is often biased towards a particular set of journals regardless. Nature can be particularly bad where this is concerned. So Nature raising fees is just another part of a broken system needing review.

I'm in my late 30's and once I had kids my memory was shot. I personally think kids kill cells faster than age could ever do.

Seriously, do we really want to be fully aware of our suffering as we age and our mortality? Seems nature was doing us a favor by making us oblivious to our own demise.