Machiavellian, are you serious? He could have had all of Ukraine in 2-3 years, maybe less. He just had to be less of an elephant in a glass store. A little patience and the next group of greedy oligarchs would have done his job for him. Putin is paranoid, not very smart guy with inferiority complex.

It is a terrible atrocity. I just wish people would think the same way of the Serbian train that was bombed by NATO in the 90s. 16 women and children. Somehow some lives are more precious than others...

Reading comprehension failure? Or perhaps my English is not that good? Let's give it another try, shall we? My point was that as something designed much earlier its design was at disadvantage to that of the shuttle and therefore its safety is more impressive. As for the ratio- I am pretty certain that this is what I said as well.

No, it does not. He falls prey to conformational bias. First the difference in number of flights (135 vs 120) is insignificant. Second, first Souyz flew in 1966 (or 1967, don't remember). It did that almost 15 years before the first shuttle flight. Therefore it had to use older technology and do so without much of the experience, technology and knowledge that the designers of the shuttle had. Perhaps it is not coincidence that the 2 losses Souyz had were before the shuttle even took off. Compare this to the shuttle failures. I think that Souyz is more reliable than the shuttle, but I admit that this is opinion rather than data supported hypothesis since data points are few and unreliable (near misses).

You were lucky you were hit by one of these cars and not by another 30 year old dinosaur. The car that got smashed probably saved your life or at least prevented you from a long hospital stay by being so 'smashable'. Try hitting a foam mattress with your head. It is OK, right? Now try to hit your concrete floor. Seeing stars?

A lot of inference from not much data. Aren't you just a bit overinterpreting? Maybe missing a variable here and there? Just asking....

I am sorry, but you do not understand drug discovery process. You also speak like a person who has tons of experience in the field. Which I think is not the case. It will do you good (and to your career) to have more humility and knowledge and make less profound statements. Like this one: "...particularly when the actual biochemists in charge of drug production don't trust bioinformatics anyway,..." Maybe there are pharma companies where biochemists do not work with bioinformaticians. The ones I am aware of definitely go the other way.

And I am saying that it is. You cannot simply exclude drug discovery from medicine now, can you? Or biologics production. No matter how you look at your statement it is simply wrong. And yes- I did read the other comments. So I did not see anyone mention drug discovery. Perhaps you are unaware how drug discovery works, but I have been in the field long enough to tell you what you say is very far from the truth.

Comparative genetics/genomics is of HUGE value to medicine and pharmacogenomics. The very essence of of drug discovery is based on selecting animal model and exploring mechanism of action and protein structure in several animals. Having outliers organisms is very important to having power in comparative analysis and accidentally red panda and sea turtle would make nice outliers. To simplify this imagine you need to know if a residues is critical for the function of a protein- you look in sea turtle and you that it is conserved, just as in chimp and rhesus and rodents. Pretty good hint this is an important residue. Samantha, this was a free lesson, but reading some good drug discovery book would be helpful for you. Most biologics are produced in CHO (Chinese hamster ovary cell line). We frequently need to know the sequence of the CHO/hamster genome.