"it would be a huge shock to discover oxygen causes cancer in people"

Er... oxygen causes cancer in people. It's why antioxidants are popular:

Oxidative Stress

You are American, yes? If you all drove small 1 litre 50 horsepower cars instead of 6-litre 400 horsepower SUV monstrosities, you could also gain energy independence that way. (just a wild out-there blue-sky suggestion.)

iPhone or Droid

Reminded me more of Davd Hahn - thought he was maybe up to his old tricks again and looking for a large amount of Americium (not from fire alarms this time though).

It's kind-of sad that this question even needs to be asked after 3 generations of global mobile telephony.
  As Andy Tanenbaum said: "The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.".
You'd think that by now we could agree on a unified solution for 4G.

Well, strictly speaking the cloud is 'remote storage and remote processing', which is a bit of a mouthful. Cloud is one syllable in place of several, which is more of a practicality than marketing hype IMHO.

This recent news story in the UK Makes me sad. It doesn't matter how long you want to live if you have no legal choices when you want to stop living.

It seems like we give our pets more compassion at the end of their lives than we do our fellow humans.

Personally I love Andrew Wiles' description of the process of scientific research in the first minute or 2 of this science show.

We toss cabers, not cellphones.

I'd be more inclined to say 'Idiocracy' covered this topic. The kind of parents with that level of morality are more likely not to have kids at all, or at least fewer than the rest. It's Gresham's law applied to genetics - bad genes drive out the good.

Just for fun, the fictional MiG-31 aircraft from the movie Firefox was capable of Mach 6, the advantage presumably being that it could simply outrun any incoming attack.

How about burning? I know dried animal dung is used for cooking, maybe the same could apply with dried human waste? The resulting ash would still be high in N and P and of course pathogen-free.

The best use for human excrement is fertilizer really - high phosphorous and nitrogen content, ideal for the fields. It's certainly more environmentally friendly than fossil-fuel based fertilizers (and not just in the third world either).

I'm not so sure. She has kind-of become the fruit-fly of molecular biology, famous that way. You just _know_ that in 100 years time, some crazy young genetics grad is going to figure out how to turn off the 'infinite lives' mod, switch the cell-type from 'cervix' to 'stem' and clone the old gal for the lulz.