Try this substitution key: terrorists \ manipulators

Folks, they're manipulators. The point is manipulation. The less you worry about them, the more they've won.

And people who make a big deal about them and about fighting them are doing exactly what the government want, what the manipulators need.

Or in other words, check:
www.zeitgeistthemovie.com

To see the invisible hands and strings.

It was not the terrorists that robbed you of your freedom.

Two things the skeptical in me has not seen mentioned yet:

- how does the MIT team's achievement compare with the contenders? Or in other words, are the solutions genuinely original?

- how do they know how much less fuel with be spent? Simulations? Don't trust those when there are too many assumptions to make. Claiming the results of simulation as fact is bad practice.

I can design an aircraft that in simulation consumes no fuel at all.

The research on Asphalt Volcanoes is so timely. So much so, that the wikipedia article referred in parent was created on the April 30th this year. Barely two weeks ago. Maybe a bit too timely, I am afraid.

But to leave uncanny coincidence aside, there is a crucial bit of the information missing in the wikipedia article: how does nature's own Asphalt volcano compare with the human's one?

Turning on and off a gene does not turn on and off a single function. It deploys, or not, the set of interdependent processes whose outcome is an organism with said function.

A knockout is by definition the turning off of a gene. In fact a better metaphor is the 'removal of a switch', that in all likelihood will operate in a bunch of processes, hierarchically dependent on each other, with complex and unforeseen consequences.

The fact that the scientists can find 'statistical significance' in the correlation between the presence of a function and a gene says nothing about the process by which that function is begotten. That would be the more interesting question, as usual side stepped. An appropriate tag would be 'correlationnotcausation'.

They did not find how to make an immune cell. They found how to break the ones we have. There are probably multiple genes that will break that cell. Viruses found them, so will we. But we, being a tad smarter than viruses, had a bit of responsibility to understand our problem a little further.

The headlines of the next article in slashdot is 'how to make science popular again'. Starting out by reframing the findings, to bring back the ages when science was honest, transparent, earnest and genuinely interested in understanding.

Years ago when i discovered /. the articles had hyperlinks to all that was relevant to them. Nowadays there is a sentence such as:

"detailed in a PNAS study published today." Without any reference whatsoever to the paper itself. I checked PNAS's today's table of contents and found no such article. It must be there somewhere, but i am losing time to find it. Where is it? Shouldn't it be hyperlinked in the article itself? Who are the authors?

And after 115 replies no one seems to have mentioned the original article.
That's how deep the discussion has been so far.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.