The best solution would be a portable low-power high-field NMR (OK, I might as well ask for a flying unicorn). You can detect characteristic resonances for a gazillion compounds and through TOCSY isolate them from other signals. IMO 50% of diagnostic medicine or more could be done with NMR.

The funny thing is, Planetes wasn't really about collecting space junk.

It's not like the US government isn't trying to subvert foreign governments worldwide. It's a reasonable concern. On the other hand, banning things like twitter isn't going to fix the problem.

The internet is a fad. All too soon it will be vastly different from what it was for the last 20 years.

Thanks to redundant backups, the average downtime of a cloud-top computer is likely much lower than that of a desk-top computer.

Unfortunately science isn't free and funding is not proportional to the number of scientists.

Oh, that may be believed, but its prevalence as a theory is due to the somewhat poor level of retrospect we currently have. I don't think anyone who's given it much though will believe it, anyhow. It's just that we don't have a simpler autocatalytic molecule to point to. While it's very likely that life passed through an RNA world stage; to imply it's the consensus on the origin of life is naive.

International Genetically Engineered Machines competition Look forward to some very affordable kits to be introduced this year.

It's probably an incremental title - the first (most) elite is elite 0, the penultimate h4x0r is elite 1, and so on... It's a privilege to be the best - a single digit is easier to type than a half dozen are, and 0 falls on the underused right-hand side of the qwertyboard.