Exciting indeed, but is this all supposed to be taken at face value? The whole "Mr Royalty" deal is quite simply statistically impossible, especially with a streak supposedly extending to several casinos. Either cheating or fiction is at play, so which is it? Surely someone with such preposterous "luck" would have made headlines, so does anybody know this guy's identity? Or maybe this is somehow resolved in the book?

Aw geez, I'm sorry. You probably couldn't hear my point over that loud whooshing noise, pookems.

@34, speaking of tools ...

Okay, fine, genocide. Certainly there's no repression there. Did you even read the comment?

@12 The Chinese have exerted a special brand of repression in Tibet and on the Dalai Lama. China didn't claim authority on appointing the next pope when John Paul II kicked off, but they've promised to do so with the next Dalai Lama.

The rights and wrongs of religions and Buddhism and the Olympics aside, having the Dalai Lama carry the torch sounds like a great protest against one of the more obvious violations of human rights perpetuated by the Chinese govt.

I'm completely dissatisfied with the TSA and our newfound sense of pervasive surveillance. However, this article doesn't really provide any way of assessing how much effect TSA policy has had on theft. There are no data from before the threat level hysteria, and the article even mentions that carousel theft may have declined due to heightened security at the baggage claim. The reporting is a bit weak in this regard; but then again, the article seems intended to point out the magnitude of the problem rather than TSA accountability. The BB post implies that TSA no-lock policy has enhanced theft. Maybe there are figures that support this assertion, but that's something of a distortion of the article.

Seriously, as per #2, fungi are very much not plants. Please tell me that a mycologists did not confuse this. Furthermore, finding "fungi" on other planets is not even remotely a foregone conclusion. Fungi derive from a long ecological and evolutionary history, in which they are only relative newcomers compared with bacterial and other unicellular forerunners. Furthermore, they're heterotrophic. The recent finding that a few fungi may (perhaps, possibly, kinda sorta) use radioactive energy still has nothing on the light and chemical energy capture practiced by other organisms.

I hate to be a downer, but "curing" aging just isn't feasible. Aging is a multi-faceted failure of the body, so there's nothing to target for a cure. Without getting uber-technical-nerdy, natural selection just isn't good at filtering out bad genes in old organisms. (Few organisms survive to old age in the real world.) On the other hand, mutation is always supplying nasty genes of many different flavors. As a result, bad genes with age-specific effects experience little selection and so they pile up in our genomes. Unfortunately, this means we can only put out some of the little fires along the way, but we're ultimately fighting a losing battle.

So I'm just looking forward to getting old so I have an excuse for the way I already dress.

That is waaay cool, but it's also begging for implementation with a regular computer trackpad. It's really not all that compact when you consider it needs to be plugged into an amp or recording device, so why not do it on your laptop where all that overhead is already in place?

Lots of hens lay green eggs. Roughly a quarter of our farmers market eggs are green. What makes this hen newsworthy?

"... all of which promise to severely alter the surrounding environment including Spiral Jetty." The blind hypocrisy is a hoot. It's like robbing a bank, then going to the cops b/c your accomplice stole the loot. Not that I'm a big supporter of oil drilling, but c'mon now.

The airplane treadmill seems to generate a lot of debate b/c the problem is poorly worded and generates confusion. Depending on how you read it, that treadmill is either no problemo or an infinite impossibility.

I originally read it to mean the treadmill was somehow preventing forward motion of the plane relative to the air, so that the plane was essentially taking off vertically. That wouldn't work, and I think that's where the confusion comes in -- not that people think of planes driving like cars, but that they think air isn't moving over the wings.

As others point out, there's really no way a treadmill can pull this off with aircraft wheels. If the problem isn't constraining the movement of the plane relative to their air and the rest of the earth, the wheels and treadmill are irrelevant -- they wheels are only there to minimize the friction between the ground and the plane, and the treadmill has little effect. This seems to be how most people read the problem in the first place.

Ha! I first thought the dirty answer, then realized it was supposed to be subtext. But that makes the dirty answer even funnier.

Sad it isn't spelled with the "secks" suffix (or sufficks?). Scrabble doesn't roll with the new kids.

I'm with #4. The article seems crafted to generate outrage at the actions of the police, but it's so full of holes that it doesn't even qualify as reporting. Grandmother of eight? Oh, those pigs!

@38, While this story is almost certainly false, it still seems worth noting that the risk of birth defects from sibling pregnancies are by no means overstated. Humans genomes carry a remarkably high number of very nasty recessive genes. For example, ~1 in 25 people of northern European ancestry carry the cystic fibrosis allele, and that's just one of many such rare diseases. Siblings are a full 50% related, and their offspring 25%. For each of those rare recessives residing in mom or dad, and accounting for how our chromosomes get allocated, you're looking at a 1 in 16 chance of the birth defect. Compare that with a ~1 in 200 chance for CF if one of your parents is a carrier and you hook up with an unrelated northern European (less still if you connect with someone from different ancestry). Between mom and dad, you can expect at least a few such genes to be lurking, and genetic screening can only nail down those we've previously identified.

For cousins, the case is arguably exaggerated, since you're only 12.5% related, cutting the risk four-fold compared to siblings. But it's important to understand the science before proclaiming incest is a strictly social taboo -- it seems quite plausible that the social intolerance for incest has very practical roots.

@#2
Um, again, I am a biologist. Viruses most assuredly do reproduce. They also metabolize, perhaps just not in ways consistent with thinking of organisms as walled-off entities (which of course they're not, but that's another issue). Folks looking for life's origins here and elsewhere in the universe now tend to settle on reproduction and evolution as the defining qualities of "life". Other criteria quickly devolve into special exceptions and distinctions that limit their generality. If you want a real slam-dunk essay on the issue, check out Lin Chao's 2000 article in BioScience, vol 50, p 245-250.

I'm also unclear on how creating an organism from scratch provides new empirical evidence. There's simply no question it can be done; as has already been shown with viruses, enough manipulation of the components will eventually get you there just as it does in biological reproduction. Venter's institute already achieved a complete bacterial genome transplant, and so I don't know where we're supposed to draw the arbitrary distinction for "creating" life.

Doing so under a particular set of conditions provides no firm answer regarding life's origins on earth, as we cannot observe the original conditions or (just as importantly) the specific event that gave rise to our common ancestor. How can we recreate an event when we don't even know what the event looked like? Did life start as a bleb of lipids? Unprotected RNA? Protein? They're all open questions, and I truly hope we can find airtight answers to dig further back into our ancestry. But if someone manages to create a modern bacterium from scratch, they've created something that didn't exist at life's origin. If they create a reasonable progenitor, others will (and should) doubt whether it resembles our actual common ancestor.

I understand the fascination with replicating the grand experiment. It may provide some useful technical insights. But "making life" doesn't represent the major milestone Venter (an untiring self-promoter) would like us to believe. It also won't do anything to convince a bunch of evidence-proof creationists that we came from the primordial soup. Ignoring overwhelming evidence of universal organismal ancestry has certainly immunized the lot against our origins.

Frankly, I don't see what the fuss is about. Viruses have already been synthesized from the "ground up", both as pure nucleic acids and as disparate pieces reassembled into a functional form. Viruses are indeed organisms by any reasonable and modern definition of life, and one can make a very persuasive argument that properly designed computer programs also fit the bill.

Regardless, assembling life from little pieces happens all the time -- that's how everybody reproduces to begin with. While doing this for bacteria certainly offers some interesting technological prospects, figuring out one more way to engineer life doesn't seem to offer nearly as much insight as observing the disparate ways nature has managed the job.

As a biologist, I should probably be more excited. As an evolutionist, I think we're sometimes a bit too impressed and too narrowed by our own efforts to imitate the great experiment going on around us.

@31,

Don't worry, I didn't read all that into your blurb -- It was @27, not @24.

@27 As an evolutionary biologist, I have to express doubt. Unless there's some constant selection to make us heavier, a trait doesn't just start sweeping through the population just because you stop selecting against it. Plus, selection proceeds on a generational basis -- even though your grandmother was born quite a while ago, that's still just 2 generations, with little opportunity for a measurable difference except under the most extreme magnitudes of selection.

There are reasonable (though often completely speculative) arguments about how evolutionary forces impact our switch to agriculture and industry. Historical selection to eat whenever possible is one example. Just keep in mind that, for the time scales we're dealing with, the pace of change in our circumstances likely far outstrips the pace of change in our genes. A good example is the oft-cited "evolution" towards greater height among Europeans since the Middle Ages (just look at those tiny doors!). We are indeed a lot taller now, but it's because our health and nutrition are so radically improved (despite McD's :). One might suggest that hasn't just impacted our growth upwards!

It's just too easy to distill everything down to a sound bite. And really, I think that's the problem all around (as others already indicated) -- we want the easy answer.

Food at McDonalds is bad for you. But it's not the source of our problems. Even Supersize Me, with all its theatrics, concludes it ain't all bad if consumed moderately.

McD's wants to blame video games, video games want to blame Doritos, Doritos want to blame TV, TV wants to blame, um, McD's? At the end of the day, maybe we should all *get outside for a few minutes* and stop being, er, pound foolish. (Sorry, had to.)

I guess it's mildly amusing, but why is this even worth posting? I just don't think it merits the attention, and I only wish I'd been there to eat than damned grilled cheese sandwich as it came off the griddle.

Meh, the art is better than reading another Cry psh, but I don't get why just about all the art here involves sexed up nude/nudish women. I understand geeks are into the ladies, but boingboing's art sense needs to graduate from 9th grade.

@3: I don't follow your bouncing ball. Without the internet, the library would be productive? Should we eliminate Danielle Steel novels? I mean, those are fully unproductive. Regardless of how much porn it's buried under, the internet is the best thing to happen to information in at least a century. Taking the library offline would turn it not into a den of productivity, but into a ghost ship.

What really blows my mind about the Wolfram post (and everything he writes) is the sheer arrogance of the man. Yes, it's a big accomplishment. But he spends only a fraction of the article acknowledging Smith's contribution. Mr Wolfram clearly seems more satisfied with himself for "discovering" the machine (via a heuristic search, it seems?) than with the proof, which merely confirms his awesomeness. Even Alan Turing gets little credit for his lame-o, messy version of the universal machine -- it's a shame they put his name on it.

Maybe I'm just too bitter at other stuff I've read from Wolfram, but his style makes my skin crawl. And every time Mathematica ticks me of I curse him under my breath.