See: Northern California(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_California), South Jersey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Jersey), etc.

I'm surprised the DoD is spending as little as $250MM on this type of Big Data/AI research. Most of the technology outlined in Lemnois' memo is interesting and exciting, rather than intimidating and indicative of "Terminator development." I'm particularly excited about "reasoning and inference engines that can learn from experience with little training and within mission timeframes" and advances in "human-machine interfaces to enable seamless collaboration for operations and for training." Maybe a little less hyperbole in the post title next time?

they're not only spending $250mil, they're spending an ADDITIONAL $250mil on this new project.

Agreed. In fact, none of it is indicative of terminator development. That's a totally different DoD initiative.

I would recommend monitoring for specific hazards. To satisfy New York State Department of Health standards, my laboratory must perform biannual hazard exposure monitoring for all lab personnel. There are personal monitors that assay for a variety of hazardous chemicals: http://www.labsafety.com/personal-monitors_24532949/?searcht... These are submitted to a reference lab after completing a time-weighted exposure and the results come back within a week or so. Of course "air quality" is drastically different in an office versus a laboratory, but the process of eliminating potential threats rather than trying to quantify how "good" your ambient air is more practical and applicable.

Are there any graphics in the works? It's fun to click around with as-is, but would be a much better learning tool if one could see the sugar chains be broken down etc. Maybe a flash or spark when a phosphate group is removed from an ATP molecule...

That's actually a pretty feasible suggestion! I can't spend too much more time on it because of my education and because the main functionality of the app is finished, but the visualization of the release of energy sounds doable. Ideas on how to do it with pure Javascript/HTML/CSS?

You could do it comic-book style, by just flashing a shiny graphic that says "React!" over the enzyme.

This is a link to the full text: http://extremelongevity.net/wp-content/uploads/als_discovery...

I'm hesitant to put too much hope in this discovery. I would expect a discovery of this magnitude to be published as a full article in Nature, rather than a Nature Letter. I'm not sure of the difference in the publishing process for the two, but Letters generally come across a bit rushed and are less exhaustive than published articles (citation needed).

The difference between letters and full articles is described here [1]. I don't think that one should view the length of the paper or whether it's published as a Letter or an article as a marker for its scientific importance.

For instance, The paper that Watson & Crick published that described the structure of DNA was only slightly longer than a single page [2].

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/gta/2a_Manuscript_forma... [2] http://www.nature.com/nature/dna50/watsoncrick.pdf