Wow. I'm a student in a research microbiology lab and I could give a rough overview of the projects of everyone in my lab, and the neighbouring sister microbiolgy lab too. There's no room for charades because one of the first questions scientists ask each other at social events of any kind is "so, what do you do/ work on?" Not to mention how much you need to rely on others just to get basic experiments in reasonable shape.

And that's how it should be. In fact, that's what you get when you work with task-oriented people who are passionate about their work. In most large corporations however, your initial enthousiasm is smuthered rather quickly by people who just want to keep their jobs. After some 6 to 12 months, you comply. Another year passes by, and you get 'promoted' to a staff function or middle management. When that happens, you're the guy telling newcomers to 'take it easy and just go with the flow'.

Whatever you do in the future, remember the spirit and work ethics of the microbiology lab. If you find yourself working somewhere lacking that spirit but having the 'corporate' attitude instead, quit right away. Seriously. You'll thank me later!

Can only conjure on that. Hell, reading that comment brings up a lot of nice memories from back the day when I was young. You know, before I got promoted to, yes, a staff function. How do I miss these days. Unfortunately they won't come back..

So yes, try to work in environments with that attitude as long as you can!

Money is also a lot tighter in research labs, so lab heads have to run a tight ship and account for everything.

I actually felt the tesco ad was marginally better than the apple ad. It's still very vague but at least attempts to convince the reader they are doing something about the horse meat scandal, albeit, not particularly convincingly.

I read the article properly and came to the same conclusion. The author (of the article, unsure of the book) is definitely arguing that Progress is a flawed concept because of the frailty of human nature.

Genetic alteration and controlled environments might help solve these issues and help overcome the "human nature sucks" argument against the idea of Progress. But maybe the problem is more universal than human nature. One could argue that we become "less" human by attempting to make ourselves less irrational or prone to being negatively effected by our environment with the endpoint being that we become some kind of rational uncaring machine that is every Romanticist's worst nightmare.

I'm not doing a terribly good job of getting my point across so I'll reference some good reading that relates to this:

For becoming less human try: Blindsight by Peter Watts

For a vision of a technocratic utopia try Iain Bank's Culture novels.

Genetic modifications can't alter human nature. What you'll have is a different species, closely related to humans. You can argue that's just semantics, I can agree to a point but unless you give a proper answer to what does it mean to be human my criticism is still valid.

As long as we're going to argue semantics, a "species" is a set of animals who can reproduce with each other.

Dogs are all still dogs, despite the massive genetic changes we've imposed on the various breeds. They can all still interbreed.

I really don't expect humans to accept genetic modifications that make their offspring reproductively incompatible with the rest of humanity. So speciation seems unlikely.

There are genetic differences between different human races... not to mention constant mutations.

Well the top post about a security flaw and the creator's superb response was what I was looking for to confirm some kind of semi-legitimacy before I post a link to facebook.

I agree with your argument. But I think the internet's strongest trait is not necessarily revolutionary changes (wikileaks and arab spring). The things that have been built on the internet have been incredible. Think of crowdsourced projects like wikipedia and how ridiculously trivial it is for a scientist (or someone like me; a student in a lab) to access information or search for experimental data (genes are the tip of the iceberg here).

I don't want to belittle the Arab Spring, but the NCBI database and Wikipedia have arguably had an even larger impact on society than social networking's capability for kickstarting revolution. It's just slower and less obvious.

Really? My 5 seconds of google showed links saying pretty much the same thing as OP's article. No one died from radiation poisoning (yet).

The title of the story is "Japan's radiation disaster toll: none dead, none sick".

6 (?) workers died. Maybe not from poisoning or ionization but from something else caused by the accident. What exactly happened with the "Fukushima 50" is also unclear.

Obviously people are smart enough to carry Dosimeters and to protect themselves from radiation as appropriate and possible.

But please, saying that "nobody died/got killed (yet) from radiation => nobody died/got killed => nobody died because of Nuclear accident" is just naive. The people died because even after the power plant became unusuable, they needed to manage radiation and spreading of nuclear material. You don't exactly have that problem when dealing with non-nuclear plants. Most of the times can just run and wait. In case of a nuclear plant you need to stay on site or else...