In this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_root_wolpe_it_s_time_to_question_bio_engineering.html ... the speaker details an experiment where they had a robotic arm respond to the brain signals a monkey has when it moves one of its arms. The monkey realized intuitively how it's controlled and eventually was able to move the arm without moving its real arm, effectively giving the monkey three working arms. Might've been an ape -- I forget.

The obvious question, "How long has it been since it landed?" wasn't answered by TFA. It originally landed January 4, 2004 and has been doing research for nearly 7 and a quarter years.

I don't think you know the gravity of what you've done. You've just popped the cherries of millions of the 98% of long-time /. readers who have never once RTFA. Now that they've had a taste, could it be a dawn of a new era?

While there's plenty you can fairly point out wrong with Apple, there's nothing wrong with being gay. I know it was in good humor, and you might very well have gay friends, but comments like this propagate prejudice. The Slashdot community's certainly got its problems, but we're better than this.

I really do find the notion of "app tabs" to be very useful. It's a small tab designed for frequently accessed pages such as your webmail (or slash dot), just showing the icon instead of the web page title. My only hope is that they provide some persistence for these tabs. I'd love if the first firefox window I opened contained my saved app tabs.

It's not just the amount of light, but also the wavelength. I watched a TED talk recently, http://www.ted.com/talks/rogier_van_der_heide_why_light_needs_darkness.html .. The guy was mostly non-technical, but he did cite a study of how the migration of birds were disturbed by our normally emitted light, but were unaffected by green light. Perhaps he has good points about how to be more selective of how we illuminate the night. On the other hand, I do find it safer and amazingly easy to drive on fully illuminated roads such as in Manhattan, as opposed to sparsely lit roadways.

I was wondering why they mention "normal light". It's not at all a measure of comparison between this new microscope and its predecessors. I figure it's an artifact of something mentioned by the interviewed scientists. The subject of observation can react to abnormal light levels, and may even die, so they cannot just up the light level.

I watched this TED talk here: "http://www.ted.com/talks/sheila_patek_clocks_the_fastest_animals.html" which details a scientist's struggles to see a tiny organism (a mantis shrimp) at high speeds, and she stressed "low light" was important, because too much light would kill it. While in the film business, more light equals better video, the same cannot be applied to biology.

With 20 ft per second I can maybe agree (that translates to a quarter an inch of steel per millisecond on a stationary target), but when they hit 2000, it's quacking like the duck that it is.

What's even more crazy is that their ultimate goal is to reach a megawatt of power and burn through *2000* feet of steel per second. I'd imagine seeing a phalanx of tanks, and with one 3 second FWOOOONG! from the laser, our military crosscuts through them all in one sweep. Here's the Wired article I'm referring to: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/unexpectedly-navys-superlaser-blasts-away-a-record