If this were a significant issue, we'd be seeing dramatic changes in the dating scene. Reports from colleges with male female ratios as skewed as little as 55/45 (in either direction) suggest that even reasonably small changes tend to have drastic social consequences. Yet it doesn't seem like anything like that is being observed in the adult world (for lack of a better term).

Ninety percent huh? Ever heard of Pioneer Hi-bred? Syngenta? BASF? Monsanto's market share if the american seed corn market fluctuates between 30-40%. And yes, their lawyers are trigger happy. But that's no excuse for getting your facts wrong.

Although at least in my field the problem is that no one ever thought to set lower limits on the quality of what you can call a genome. So now we get "genomes" made up of 100,000 contigs (many only a couple of hundred base pairs long) and even counting all of those, the total sequence might account for only 70% of the total size of the genome. But it's still a "genome" paper, which is still an instant ticket to Nature Genetics (or Nature Biotechnology if the assembly is REALLY bad).

BGI is certainly one of the biggest offenders (Cucumber and Pigeonpea are both examples of the sort of terrible genomes-in-name-only BGI puts out) but I think the real problem is that Illumina sequence data is so cheap people keep trying to use it to sequence genomes, thinking if they throw enough raw data and enough mate-pair libraries at the problem it'll eventually make up for the fact that Illumina reads are so short. Illumina data is great for a lot of things. Calling SNPs, measuring gene expression, studying methylation patterns.

But, at least for any genome significant transposon content, it simply does not work.

Obligatory post by a plant biologist who is sick of the animal folks overgeneralizing their findings in press releases.

It seems to me neither taking money way from rich people nor people not paying their student loans were responsible for creating "this situation" (I'm assuming you mean the ongoing bad economy). So while I agree the protests are unfocused and/or advocating extreme positions, at least their positions are extreme in the OPPOSITE direction from what got us into this mess.

Your sig line is awesome!
(Fellow biologist)

To maintain a stable orbit at the same distance from a more massive object would mean moving faster, not slower, right?

Thirty-three states exclude food from sales tax, and only nine tax it at the same rate as things people don't need to survive.

Now if you live in one of those eight states, like Oklahoma or Mississippi, I agree you've got a legitimate grievance with the way your state is being run.

You give the initial percentage of the school's total operating budget supported by the state. Now I don't know what percentage of the budget originally came from student tuition, but let's say it was also 20%. If state support drops 7% to 13%, then to make up the same amount of funding from tuition (bringing tuition to 27% of the total budget) would require raising tuition 35%. And this doesn't take into account regular inflation, which would have driven a 30+% increase in tuition over 10 years even without having to make up for declining state support. Even so, that doesn't explain the total increase in tuition you describe, but it does explain why the increase was going to be a whole heck of a lot more than 7% regardless.

People deciding to be calm and logical and sacrificing for the good of humanity as a whole? (The opposite of the ignorance and greed and fear we see all around us.) Or some guy in a lab coat eventually inventing a quick technical fix?

Personally I think cold fusion (or a similarly improbable technological breakthrough like the sunlight->metal->hydrogen described in this article based solely on computer simulation) is by far the more likely of the two possibilities, so I find joy in reading stories like this one, and continue to hope that someday, one of them will come to fruition.