I suppose it really is to much to ask that people Read The Fucking Study...

In a nutshell, this study collected drug use data from 3095 drivers involved in crashes and 6190 matched control drivers. THC was detected in 234/3095 crash involved drivers, vs 379/6190 controls. That sample size is plenty. If you think otherwise, please explain why you think the studies' methodology is statistically underpowered.

The biggest caveat is probably that THC testing can be positive even if the drug use was days or weeks ago. I'm not aware of a test that, like BAC, can detect whether someone is high as balls right now. That makes the conclusions a bit weaker, but we can still conclude that people who frequently use marijuana are not riskier drivers than anyone else, and blood THC testing is not a measurement of impairment.

Do you have any links to those papers or related articles? I am intrigued, but I won't be searching for "environmental fetishes" on a work computer...

The Surface Pro 3 could be the best tablet I've seen so far to actually substitute for a paper notepad and stack of printed reading material. As a biology graduate student, I can envision several use cases that aren't well served by any other devices:

1) It could be the electronic lab notebook that so many scientists have been waiting for. Even though I use a desktop to write protocols and analyze data, I always end up using paper at the bench. If I write up a protocol, I print a copy so that I can carry it to the bench and scribble notes as I go. Similarly, for small and medium scale data collection, I record the data on a notepad and only later transcribe it to the computer. With OneNote, a good stylus, and a good aspect ratio for portrait, this could conceivably replace the binder full of papers I keep at my lab bench. (Difficulty: is it water and solvent resistant? Can it be covered in plastic without overheating or blocking the touch screen?)

2) This could be the best tablet for reading big stacks of 8.5x11 inch PDFs. It's got the right display size, aspect ratio, pixel density, and again the styles could be pretty handy. A 10" tablet is too small, particularly with a low resolution screen. Fingertips or capacitive styluses are too imprecise for highlighting and note taking. On the other hand, I find reading it tedious to read much on a desktop, even with a good monitor. At 800g, the Surface Pro 3 isn't even that heavy by paper standards: the textbooks I have next to me are 1-3 kg, and I have many stacks of journal articles that weigh more than 1 kg.

3) Finally, it could be a good tablet for the sorts of image manipulation I do. If it's good enough for Gabe at Penny Arcade, it should be more than good enough for my modest needs. I spend a lot of time with Inkscape and Paint.net making figures for presentation and publication. (I even, I am ashamed to admit, use PowerPoint vector graphics more than anyone ever should.) It's never anything fancy, but I bet a good screen and stylus would be faster than doing everything by keyboard and mouse. Plus, I can use all of my usual scientific image processing software, and directly transfer processed images to other programs for further manipulation.

All of these uses are purely as a tablet or desktop replacement. I can't even see much use for the type cover to be honest, I'd rather just use the dock so I can plug in a real keyboard and mouse along with an external monitor.

However, it's way out of my grad-student budget. I'll be waiting for price drops (and other competitors) as I save up enough money. Or perhaps my research advisor has money budgeted for lab computers.

This was my first concern. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations:

Photosynthesis is pretty lousy in terms of thermodynamic efficiency. About 1% of the light that hits a plant is converted to useful chemical energy. The plant will have to use most of that energy for its metabolic processes. Luciferase itself is a very efficient enzyme, however, so I'll generously assume that 10% of the energy that the plant captures can be turned into useful light. So the overall efficiency can't be much higher than 0.1%. By comparison, solar cells are around 10% efficient, and LEDs 20%, so at first glance the luciferase plant seems to be an order of magnitude less efficient than the solar powered flashlight my in-laws gave me for christmas.

In absolute terms, there is about 100 watts/meter^2 of energy in sunlight. If you've got a one-square-meter window full of the hypothetical plants sitting in sunshine all day, let's say they can absorb 1500 watt-hours, and then convert 1.5 watt-hours into useful light. That'd be comparable to running a 5-watt LED for an hourish, which could be useful if you could turn the luminescence on and off at will. But if the plant is glowing all night and only a portion of the light is emitted in a useful direction, maybe the window-full-of-plants would give off light comparable to the little cluster of LEDs on the front of my computer. So overall I'd say that the idea is not completely impossible, but still totally impractical.

A "four year thesis project" sounds just about right to me. My particular program in biology has an average completion time of 5.5 years, and the national average I believe is 6.5 years. But I don't even have a formal thesis project until I write a proposal for the end of my second year. I spent my first year taking classes and doing research rotations. I'm currently in my second year, I've picked a lab and started to do some productive research, but I still have classes and TA duties, and I spent a lot of time this year learning the techniques that I will need for my thesis. So yeah, I'm aiming for a "four year thesis project".

I'm a little shocked that 10 or 11 years is at all normal. In my experience, anything beyond 7 years is the stuff of horror stories. 10+ years must be in fields where a grad student has to do their research after working as a TA for 30+ hours per week to afford their ramen.

Have you ever actually used a microscope? You can't just put one on an arm and wave it over a patch of dirt and expect to see anything interesting. Microscopes capable of resolving bacteria have a very tiny depth of field, so if you point it at a patch of ground there'd be nothing in focus. You have to take samples, mount them on a slide, stain them (usually), and then place them under a microscope. And on Mars, most potentially interesting microbes will probably be buried. To do that you have to have some fairly sophisticated sample handling mechanisms... which is exactly what this new mass spec instrument doesn't need. Now you just point it at an interesting patch of dirt, zap it with the laser, and suck all of the vaporized ions into the mass spec.