Zinc Fingers

"Only one man seems ever to have been cured of AIDS, a patient who also had leukemia. To treat the leukemia, he received a bone marrow transplant in Berlin from a donor who, as luck would have it, was naturally immune to the AIDS virus. If that natural mutation could be mimicked in human blood cells, patients could be endowed with immunity to the deadly virus. But there is no effective way of making precise alterations in human DNA"  

Until now.

Now, for the piddling price of $39,000, you can order up a protein that will slice and splice a DNA molecule at the precise location where you want to insert a modification.

Absolutely amazing!

Copenhagen

The amazing part about the Copenhagen conference on climate change is that the results are completely predictable.  They will not get the promises from the countries of the world that they want and even if they did, and if those countries actually lived up to their promises, the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) scientists are saying that it's not enough to avert disaster.  That was also the result of the Kyoto conference.

Seems to me that it's time for plan B.  If we fear flooding by the oceans, it's time to pull back from the coasts or build dikes.  Take a clue from the Dutch.  It's infinitely cheaper than Plan A, which seems to require the destruction of the global economy.

Climategate

Well, we finally got some action out of our very secretive climate researchers. Most of the action is the usual bluster, but if the release of these emails and files forces them to be more transparent, it will be a great victory for science.

It has been completely inexcusable from the beginning that hundreds of millions of tax-payer dollars have been spent on research that is not open to the public. Results, yes.  But data, computer models and methodology have been hidden from anyone who is not in "the tribe."  In other words, it was impossible for real science to work.