ripperdoc's clinic

We imagine making products “not found in nature”—but even natural microbes make molecules that organic chemists would never dream of. Look at thisantitumor agent discovered from a filamentous soil bacterium, the kind of bacteria that give soil that new smell in the springtime (Science 297:1170). Those sets of three parallel lines are each triple bonds, within a nine-carbon ring. Who would even think to draw such a thing, let alone make it? To make it, the bacteria use modular enzymes, nanoscale assembly lines that condense one functional part after another. The original nanotechnology.

Brilliance from Quiet Babylon:

• If unborn have rights, what about the indefinite number of future generations?
• By going vegan, you’ll help reducing number of born animals..
• Can you preserve animals in order to be able to hunt them?
• Are vat grown people born or not?
• What about failed fertilisations - how many unborn are killed?

Read on!

Key highlights:

• Lots of old people
• Lots of environmental danger

MI:4 has reminded me how effective the physical security attack really is. While today’s military grade firewall may be Fort Knox at keeping people out of the tubes, there’s really nothing that’s going to stop a hacker if they’re sitting right in front of the machine. Or if their increasingly disgruntled team leader is sitting in front of the machine with a pocket router after having scaled the sheer side of the tallest building in Dubai using only a suction cup and a fire hose. Or if the guy on the team who was never part of the plan that has to slide down an HVAC shaft into a subterranean server room that without the cooling system has become “an oven”, and by the way the walkie-talkies aren’t working and the bad guys just cut the satellite feed, is sitting right in front of the machine. Or if the plucky new female agent with a grudge and something to prove floats a balloon holding a wireless connection device over a wall to get into the signal area….

Well, I guess they can’t all be extreme, but it shows the excellent point that if your physical security strategy doesn’t cover the 50 feet underground and the 15,000 feet of air space above it, you’re doomed. (Don’t worry the plucky female agent gets extreme redemption when she completes one of our other favorite old-school physical hacks, the ‘beating someone with a $5 hammer [xkcd] until they tell you the password’ technique.)

Oh, and also everyone on the property should probably be assigned a dog because people are incredibly dumb

I’ve put together a little quiz that may be of interest to Boing Boingers. The idea is to illustrate just how hard it can be distinguish police from military. Which is a problem, given that they have two very different jobs.

The robot’s are going to have a hard time taking over the world anytime soon…