I have to second this. Living in Germany, I can only watch movies and series in German, because apparently the English original soundtrack is not worthy of being added to the stream, although they actually have that audiotrack, while they sometimes even play it silently in the background, apparently just to tease me. I just watched the Formula 1 GP, which is painful with very partial German commentaries. British commentaries would be nice, but GeoIP seems to dislike me watching British tv. And then the question is: why bother with shady proxies when you can also get the same show by pirating? I don't get it. To summarize: audiodubbing leads to piracy!

The simple answer: lots of dikes are built to guide the rivers to the sea. In some places the land is several meters lower than the riverbed. This usually doesn't go wrong, but if it does (during very hot summers) the dikes may break and flood parts of the land. This is what actually happened in Wilnis in 2003. The dike gave away to the water and the canal poured into the surrounding land. The canal was quickly sealed and the water pumped away. Luckily most of the land is divided into separate sections, so that only small parts flood. Basically, when the dikes break, we need to pump like crazy.

the country I live in, the Netherlands, has one fourth of the land below sealevel by as much as 48 feet already. I guess we can handle a few additional feet of water. More water spurs great engineering, and has done so since medieval times. That doesn't mean you can't leave your SUV at home and take your bicycle to work today, though.

Make them largelier!. Ow wait, that might not be the point of a netbook.

That is not exactly right. There actually are reports about larger studies using cord blood transplantation in leukemia. In the UK people are working on standard treatment protocols for cord blood transplantations.

First of all, disclaimer: I am a molecular biologist working on gene therapy of the blood system. Cord blood banking has been around for quite a while. In the early days, storing cord blood wasn't a very viable option, mainly because we didn't know how to grow a sufficient number of blood stem cells from the tiny amount of cells in a cord blood sample. This question seem to have been solved and cord blood transplants are used in leukemia cases What makes cord blood banking even more interesting IMHO, is all the research going on in the reprogramming fieldPeople try to 'reset' a cell to a 'embryonic' state and guide its development to the desired tissue (liver and pancreatic tissues are currently under investigation) For these kinds of approaches, cord blood cells might be very suitable, since it essentially is 'newborn' tissue. In the end, it would be really good to have some cord blood saved if you need it for treatment 10-20 years from now. The chances of needing it might, however, be quite slim.

No it doesn't take 4 hours: (Disclaimer: IAAMB) New PCR technologies (faster cyclers and faster enzymes http://www1.qiagen.com/HB/QIAGENFastCyclingPCRKit_EN.pdf) now allow PCR in as little as 10-20 minutes, instead of the usual ~90 minutes. Gel electrophoresis is also quite a bit faster than 45 minutes, so all this is definitely possible for specific optimized reactions as described here.