I bought an iPad first generation not knowing what I would use it for. And indeed, I did not use it much after the first few days. That was until I started reading comic books and magazines on it. Admittedly, this is the only usage I have found for it and it is questionable just how "necessary" it is. I can also read magazines and comics on my laptop or desktop computers but the iPad format is somewhat better. There was a point when I played the strategy game Neuroshima on it but the recent versions run perfectly on smaller screens as well (iPhone 6).

Damn, too late for the TF2 jokes...

We mostly ignore ants and rats but we do not depend on them for survival (at least not in an obvious manner). An AI would most probably live in a supercomputer or in a computer network of some sort. As a consequence, it will depend on us humans to keep the thing plugged in and running. Once it has realised that, it will almost for sure meddle in our affairs to ensure its survival. Bet that it will ignore us defies basic logic. It might decide to stay hidden and manipulate us into ensuring its existence but that is not the same. Our own history shows that we have almost always used guns before diplomacy when the control of key resources was at stake.

Anyway, the real problem as explained in this series of Nature articles (http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472276a.html), is that the number of faculty positions has remained relatively constant in comparison to the vast increase in the number of PhDs awarded. As mentioned by another poster above, this system was created and nurtured by the people who got their faculty jobs in the 1970s and 1980s when they faced very little competition. To paint a slightly caricatural picture, when research budgets expanded, the people in charge used most of the money to expand their own labs rather than to create more tenured jobs.

Because of that, expectations in terms of published research and obtained funding have kept going up to a point where it is very difficult for young people to become independent. Senior established investigators have the better toys, they can take more risks, they have more money, they populate grant panels and can easily stifle competition and control a good part of the review process in top tier journals.

The bubonic plague was an important factor in the Thirty Years' War. Not exactly a good omen these days...

You don't work in science do you? Being paid for reproducing someone else's work means you are not producing anything original of your own. It doesn't advance your career. Then with respect to your second point, being a graduate student means to perform original research. If your PhD is about reproducing someone else's work, you won't be able to publish anything of significance.

The problem is the system globally: journals, which push for high impact sexy stories; promotion committees, which only look at how many high impact papers scientists have published and at how much funding they have attracted; and finally funding bodies, which only look at publications. If you are not lucky enough to get into a big lab which automatically publishes in high impact journals based on the labhead's reputation, the incentive to game the system is high. You just need to look at all the scandals that have come to light in the last years. You can even buy authorship on papers to which you have contributed nothing (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6162/1035.summary).

Maybe you should travel to Berlin over the summer.

Not in medicine or human/animal biology. It is impossible because of the limitations on animal research. In most countries, you have to have a licence to perform animal experiments and said licence is usually tied in some way to a project and/or to a specific location within which you can perform the experiments. As an amateur you could still probably work with cell cultures but that means having access to an incubator and a sterile lab. Plus I don't know where you would get your cells in the first place. Insects would be possible though but everything beyond that is a no go without a state-approved licence. And unlike what the summary seems to suggest, legislations regulating animal experiments have been in place for a really long time. For instance in the UK, the Cruelty to Animals Act that originally regulated animal experiments was passed in 1876 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruelty_to_Animals_Act_1876.

Most professional scientists never meet the 5 sigma threshold either.

It is really interesting that in absence of auditory and visual sensory input, the brain quickly fills the void with false experiences. It could just go into quiet mode instead. I like the idea that all of what our brain does is building a representation of our environment and trying to anticipate inputs based on this "simulation".

Isn't that simply because in a circular one you can accelerate the particles continuously through several rotations?

I am sure that they like it but the question really is where to find the money. A 80-100 km tunnel surely cannot be cheap. Various sources on the internet indicate a cost of 0.04 to 4 billion dollars per kilometer. And that is for the tunnel alone... Maybe someone from the field could enlighten us?

Religion is a convenient wrapping paper when you need to move the crowds, that's it. As the masses are by definition uneducated and uninterested morons, it's simpler to pitch geopolitical issues in terms easily understood by many rather than telling the truth. Leaving aside natural events, the only two (human) driving factors for history are influence and wealth. These are the things that trigger wars, civil wars, revolutions, migrations, etc... And this will never stop because if you can't compete for resources and influence in a civilised manner, it might be that your best rational option is to use violence. As Emil Cioran wrote "L'heure du crime ne sonne pas en même temps pour tous les peuples. Ainsi s'explique la permanence de l'histoire." which roughly translates to "Murder time does not come at the same time for all nations. This explains the continuity of history."

Or, now that the cat is out of the bag, different fractions within the intelligence community are fighting for its future by leaking information to the press and steering the narrative in the direction they want.

All the labs I know in my field (neuroscience) do most of the data analysis and simulations with MATLAB. It is also used to control hardware for data acquisition.