Vat-grown meat

Scientists are proposing that current techniques could be extended to enable meat to be grown in a lab.

"In the long term, this is a very feasible idea," said Jason Matheny of the University of Maryland, part of the team whose research has been published in the Tissue Engineering journal.

Some possible advantages:

• cruelty-free meat
• mercury-free fish
• meat from endangered species could be cultured for sale
• beef tissue free from BSE
• a reduction in methane, a greenhouse gas, from animal farming
• a reduction in cattle ranching, leading to less pressure on the Amazon rainforest

Given global overfishing, perhaps laboratory-grown fish will be inevitable.

Not for our kind of people?

This article in the Post-Gazette struck me:

Staff Sgt. Jason Rivera, 26, a Marine recruiter in Pittsburgh, went to the home of a high school student who had expressed interest in joining the Marine Reserve to talk to his parents.
It was a large home in a well-to-do suburb north of the city. Two American flags adorned the yard. The prospect's mom greeted him wearing an American flag T-shirt.
"I want you to know we support you," she gushed.
Rivera soon reached the limits of her support.
"Military service isn't for our son. It isn't for our kind of people," she told him.

Who then is it for? According to this piece in the U.S. Army War College's periodical, Parameters, demographics may have an answer:

In the civilian sector, the United States and the countries of Western Europe have had to rely on immigrants, some of them illegal, to supply needed younger-age labor when domestic birthrates would not have done so. And the same may again have to be the case in military recruitment, with the past indeed filled with numerous illustrative examples.

As fewer Americans step up to the plate, it's possible we may see an American Foreign Legion.

Cheaper DNA sequencing

New DNA sequencing tech has reduced the cost of sequencing the human genome from $20M (USD) to $2.2M. The long term goal is to get it down to $1K. One order of magnitude down, three more to go.

The ultimate aim is individualized prevention and treatment, but I can't help wondering what the potential is for individually tailored pathogens to be engineered. Ethnic bioweapons might be crude compared to the potential of weapons that target a tribe or clan.

Mind you, a tribal bioweapon might be thwarted by cuckoldry, as geneological parentage won't always correspond to biological parentage on the paternal side.

The Liverpool team found that rates of cases where a father was not the biological father of his child ranged from 1% in some studies to as much as 30%.
Experts have generally agreed that the rate is below 10%, with a 4% rate meaning that about one in 25 could be affected.