> in-person, you go to the voting booth by yourself. Nobody else can see your vote, so they can't buy your vote or bully you to vote a certain way.

Unless (and I know this is totally hypothetical sci-fi paranoia) one could, from the apparent privacy of the voting booth, transmit a video of the voting machine to a third party during the process of voting. Seems far-fetched, though.

> Gigantic New 3D Map

So far so good.

> Traces Every Neuron In a Tiny Mouse Brain

Nope, not even close. This is an atlas of mouse brain _regions_. The atlas does not contain information about individual neurons or their connections. The Allen Institute has done other neuron tracing experiments, but those have only sampled a small fraction (on the order of 1/1000) of the neurons in the brain, and in any case they are not included in this atlas.

The lens can change its focal length (very slightly), which would affect the range of distances over which the wearer could focus. Down with junk journalism!

The multitude of audio systems and the failure of the FOSS community to standardize on one is one of the more frustrating failings of desktop Linux in my memory.

The statement "It can't be gamed" was planted in the summary so that suckers like myself would rush to the commentary to call shenanigans.

The original publication is here: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6139/1472
And the database is here: https://bigbrain.loris.ca/main.php

Tunable, ultrafast lasers typically cost over US$100k and are widely used in microscopy. If graphene can be employed to drop the cost of these lasers, it will be very significant. I'm not holding my breath, though--demonstrating a useful optical property is not at all the same as demonstrating practical use.

That "fly" is larger than the quarter provided for scale. Biggest damn housefly I've ever seen.

I'll start: 1) Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is an essential technique in molecular biology. It is the technique that gave us the human genome project and is a key aprt of virtually every major genetic discovery for the last 20 years. Its beginnings, however, are much more humble: PCR depends on the use of thermostable polymerases to amplify DNA strands. This brings us to 1965, when Thomas Brock was studying Thermus acquaticus bacteria from hydrothermal vents. From these, he isolated Taq polymerase. At the time, nobody had any clue that hydrophilic bacteria were of national interest.

2) The discovery of green fluorescent protein, one of the most widely used tools in molecular biology. From wikipedia: "In the 1960s and 1970s, GFP, along with the separate luminescent protein aequorin, was first purified from Aequorea victoria and its properties studied by Osamu Shimomura. . . However, its utility as a tool for molecular biologists did not begin to be realized until 1992 when Douglas Prasher reported the cloning and nucleotide sequence of wtGFP in Gene.[6] The funding for this project had run out, so Prasher sent cDNA samples to several labs. The lab of Martin Chalfie expressed the coding sequence of wtGFP, with the first few amino acids deleted, in heterologous cells of E. coli and C. elegans, publishing the results in Science in 1994."

Serendipity is one of the most important forces in scientific progress. I think it would be awesome if slashdot readers could compile a list of their favorite transformative research projects that would never have been funded under the proposed bill. After a few days, we can compile them into a letter and send it to our representatives.

I am not a fan of the TSA, but let's be fair here: the purpose of doing security checks is not to catch terrorists with bombs in their shoes, but rather to eliminate shoe-bombing as a viable form of attack. The expectation is that anyone going to the effort to hijack a plane will have good knowledge of security procedures, so it is not really possible to say whether the TSA has prevented any terrorist attacks.

Regarding the out-of-memory thrashing, there is an Ubuntu bug that has been open for years that very recently got an interesting response:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/159356/comments/35

The tl;dr version is "sysctl vm.vfs_cache_pressure=100000" might fix the problem.

"Bamford projects that its processing-capacity may aspire to yottabytes, or 10^24 bytes"

Let's do some math here.. a 100,000 square-foot room with (let's be generous) 10 meter ceilings has a volume of 9.3e13 mm^3.
At 1YB, the average data density in the room would be 10 GB/mm^3, with no room left for racks, walking space, ventilation, etc.
Let's just guess that, optimistically, we can occupy about 1/10th of the total space with storage devices. Then the peak data density is 100GB/mm^3.

So a storage device with a volume of 2000 cm^3 (roughly the size of a standard hard drive) would have to hold 200 PB each. That exceeds our current capabilities by something like 10,000.

I'm gonna make some popcorn.

This is cool, but alone it does not bring electrophysiology to anybody who did not already have it. The robot only handles the easiest part of the experiment--putting an electrode into a brain and sealing onto neurons is standard practice that most electrophysiologists learn with a few days of practice.
Generally the most difficult parts of these experiments are 1) surgery / dissection, 2) keeping your animal / slice alive, 3) _keeping_ the electrode attached to the cell, and 4) managing racks full of complex, noisy, temperamental equipment. It would probably speed up the process, particularly since the experimenter is free to do other things while the robot patches cells (like prepare new electrodes for the robot).