Eye-surgery by magnetically-guided microrobots moves toward clinical trials
robohub.org
robohub.org
It suggests that a future treatment for cancers might be to "drive" a robot to a tumor cell where the end of the robot has a resonant cavity and them beam the patient with the required frequency radio signal which blows up the cell that the robot has inserted its resonant cavity into. I can't imagine yet how you could do that at the same time as imaging the cancer cells but clearly there are interesting opportunities here.
and more generally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibodies
tl;dr: use cancer-specific antibodies with a payload of a drug, gene vector, or radioactive particle (!) to very specifically kill cells.
If my understanding is correct, this could be healed if stem cells could be delivered precisely. This could concievably be possible with a system like this.
If novelty accounts were allowed, I should like to start one called "HNtrarian". ;)
HN is, basically, its front page. HN gets 100k uniques a day.
I was once at an outdoor concert along with 50k others. I remember looking around and being amazed at the sheer size of the crowd. If you've never been at an event that large, it's hard to get a feeling for just how many people 50,000 people really is. You have to imagine all of the people you've ever directly interacted with in your entire life, then somehow mentally multiply them by about 30x, then gather them all into the same field, watching the same concert stage.
HN is exactly that, except twice as big, and everyone can jump on stage at any time and speak to the entire crowd of 100k other people. Seriously, a tenth of a million!
It seems inevitable, then, that since writing a quality comment involves a lot of effort, most people who want to say something will default to the relatively effortless game of intellectual whack-a-mole against perceived flaws in other people's work. I'm sure it gives some people comfort that other people agree with them, and nothing unites people like a common enemy. So the karma counter may have inadvertently become the fuel for the middlebrow dismissals plaguing HN.