No graphene anywhere in this (or any other) plane. You are confusing something.
The composite material are carbon fibers (essentially burned nylon), not graphene, nanotubes, buckyballs or anything similarly exotic. This is then drenched in polymer resin and backed. The polymer resin is the heaviest component in the overall composition.
Platinum complexes are a standard treatment for many cancers. They intercalate in DNA, especially in rapidly dividing cells, and block DNA transscription.
These contain isolated (but complexed) metal atoms, though, not nanoparticles. I do not know whether these compounds could also serve as effective electron sources on X-ray irradiation, or whether they might form nanoparticles in a tumor cell, or outside dead cells after killing them in their primary therapeutic function.
No reputable agency will let you sign up for just one or two months for service in a really foreign place. Preparation courses alone take already more time than that.
I suggest you find something useful to do locally.
I can imagine pulling off a successful IT start-up without formal education, but a biotech company (which is among the fields listed)?
You won't even get (legally) access to microorganisms and chemicals without excellent professional standing... and I really do not see how you could get sufficiently self-educated for anything in this field beyond running a microbrewery....
Why is this kid having different results than what is documented already? If this work has been done already then this 16 year old's discoveries wouldn't be newsworthy now would they?
He is *not* having different results. That is the whole point.
Massive press hype, from reporters without science background who fell for the PR of the competition organizers.
There are X-ray structures of the protein(s) in question, with and without bound ligands. All published long before this guy started his work. And the drugs were designed by performing docking computations on the protein with the structure, and the most promising candidate structures were synthesized, binding verified, and some of them again solved as crystal structure. By looking at the docking poses, the structures were further refined by re-designing parts to better fit the protein.
Many posters here are assuming he worked on his own, brilliantly and single-mindedly breaking a new path. He did not. He worked in an academic lab and was tutored. The prof was of course well aware of the state of research. He had a bright pupil interested in learning about doing research. So he offered him to learn some of the tools of trade, on a realistic sample problem with known outcome. The guy went to work, learned a lot, made a nice poster (for a highschol student competition, not a scientific conference), and won a price for it. All very laudable and a nice achievement, but no ground-breaking genius moment.
Just to re-iterate it, the guy did not find anything which was not already known and published. He used known protein structures, known drug compounds, known binding sites, known ideas for combining drugs. So there was no original scientific research, and absolutely no novel cure, just ridiculous hype by the press. The guy mastered at age of 16 skills chemistry students are routinely acquiring at 22. Nice, but not world-shaking.
I already praised his efforts in another post. He did well, spent a lot of effort, learned something, and hopefully he will be motivated to study chemistry in university by this experience.
But he did not perform original research, and certainly did not find a cure for CF. He reproduced stuff well known among professionals. He certainly did not discover anything they overlooked.
Its the hype in the article and the Slashdot summary I am protesting against.
Thank you for so clearly demostrating what's wrong with the Pharmaceutical industry. First they brute-force through computer simulations looking for combinations that might work, then they file patents on those results as if they had done any actual research, and then just to add salt to the wound they don't even bring them to market and into the hands of patients or this kid wouldn't have even tried to do this experiment in the first place.
But then again, this is the kind of industry that blackmails governments for a living and even patents freakin' DNA so really, it shouldn't be surprising.
You are mistaken. The Vertex compounds are now in phase 3 clinical trials and will be marketed if nothing bad shows up (and if it did, it would be a financial disaster, Vertex and various foundations spent well over 100 mil USD on this project). Drugs without FDA approval (or the Canadian equivalent) cannot yet be bought in a pharmacy, that is the law. But be assured, Vertex certainly wants them on the market - otherwise there will be no recovery of expenses, and later proft.
Finally, drug combinations can only be tested in trials when the underlying single-compound drugs have been shown to be effective and safe.
The Vertex people did, and they rightfully received much praise for their results (these CF compounds are without precedent, providing a treatment option for a deadly disease).
But this has all been published, extensively, even in non-specialist journals (CE&N). *EVERY* professional chemist with a minimum interest in pharma research knows about the Vertex compounds, the different interaction points with the proteins, and the possibility of drug combinations.
Reproducing these results is a nice coursework problem, but not research. The novel results produced by what the guy did are ZERO. I am certain this project was a nice experience for him, and it may hopefully motivate him to study chemistry after finishing school. I wish him the very best for his further career.
But HE DEFINITELY DID NOT INVENT A CURE. Stating anything like that is ridiculous hype!
Sorry, but this is *not* any innovative science. Rather, it is a computational reproduction of facts already well known. Nothing more than a typical molecular modeling class assignment during a graduate chemistry education.
He did not invent any new drugs - the really breakthrough was by the researchers of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, see for example VX-770.
He did not discover the mechanism of action of the drugs. Rather, he took published protein structures and published compounds and re-ran some docking studies (of the same type Vertex and other pharmaceutical companies probably spend hundreds of thousands of processor hours on, with the difficulty that they had to check tens of thousands of compounds, not just two already known to work).
He was not the first to notice that different promising compounds in clinical trials have different points of interaction with the defective proteins of CF. Thinking that a drug combination may be useful is not exactly a new and brilliant insight, and this was for example even discussed a couple of months ago in CE&N (the general chemistry member journal of the American Chemical Society). I am very confident that is has been evaluated before, and probably there are patents already filed.
The only interesting point here is that the guy is 16,not 20 or 22 like the normal chemistry student. But then pressing the right buttons in a molecular modeling software is really not that difficult, especially when you already know the outcome you want to reproduce.
Why are posts of people demonstrably without knowledge rated "insightful" ?
"If the radiation detector is built with the proper non-removable shield then they will only be able to measure useful types of radiation"
Sorry, but such a shielding does not exist (in handheld devices, if you are willing to literally invest in a ton of electromagnets, this is a different matter).
In order to measure alpha particles, there must be the smallest possible amount of matter between the outside world and the detector. Your naive proposal in a post below to wrap the counter into a plastic bag which is swapped regularly to keep things clean results effectively in a 100% alpha radiation shield around your detector.
The problem is that alpha radiation from inhaled aerosol particles is the most dangerous component of what a broken reactor emits, and thus this it what really needs to be determined. If the radiation is blocked by a plastic bag, or dead outer skin cells, it is pretty harmless. But if you inhale, or eat, an alpha emitter and it makes a cell in your lung or stomach lining go cancerous, this is a very different matter.
So you want to shield the counter, and only measure beta and gamma, you are making the data even more useless than original (see my explanation before). Not what I call an "insightful" post.
I do actually have radiochemistry training, and your arguments show that you do not have any significant domain expertise at all. But this has never stopped anybody from posting, or insulting people, has it?
Hand-held Geiger counters, as shown on the picture in the article, and this is what I presume will be distributed, are only useful for very limited scenarios, such as a) It's ticking, I should not go any deeper into this reactor housing/nuclear explosion ground b) It's ticking. I spilled something on the lab bench/I stepped into something and should decontaminate. c) Measure something really well mixed, like Radon gas in basements, or clean analytical solutions (*not* anything from ponds or puddles, the radioactive isotopes are generally adsorbed to colloidal matter in these samples, and that brings all kinds of problems). For the latter, use a well-defined sample volume and measurement geometry for reproducible readings.
As for the diluted fallout from a reactor, that is very, very different from those scenarios. We are mostly talking about solid aerosol particles, in deposited form or drifting with the wind, which are very unevenly distributed, tend to accumulate in unexpected places, and generally stick to matter.
So this is NOT - atmospheric monitoring. Radon or other well-distributed radioactive gases are a very minor factor - fixed and standardized geometry. The picture in the article shows somebody pointing a counter to the ground. This may or may not a location where the average concentration has been enhanced or diluted. And with gamma rays, the normal square distance law applies, so minimal distance variations have a large effect. For alpha and beta, the distance law has an even higher power, because the particles collide with air molecules, or water droplets in the air. - Cleanliness is a very major factor, and not just for the case of somebody sticking a counter into a puddle. If you just put a counter onto a mast, a radioactive aerosol particle may or may not deposit on the surface of the counter - and then stick. If it sticks, it will overpower any other radiation background, just because it is so much closer to the counter, and give much exaggerated readings. If nothing happens to fall on the counter, it will underestimate the dangers- if a radioactive alpha or beta particle is drifting by within just a few centimeters, hardly anything will register because of the very limited range of this type of radiation. Air-borne aerosol contamination can only be measured reliably by sucking large, measured amounts of air through a well-defined filter, and then measuring the radiation of the filter. Simple hand-held devices are completely useless for this purpose, even if they are dusted of weekly. - In any case, the most important task will likely be to identify hot spots *on the ground, or in water*, where major aerosol deposits have accumulated, probably aided by solution/evaporation processes, and then treat these, before they get airborne again.
Measuring radiation is not as simple as measuring a temperature (and even that is something nobody wants to entrust an amateur with for the purpose of weather forecasts, etc.).
Depending on sample geometry, distance to sample, even atmospheric conditions for alpha/beta radiation, not to forget cleanliness of the counter, measurements can easily be different by a factor of 1000 or more (!) if you just hand a counter to a lay person and ask him/her to determine some radiation level out in the nature.
Without calibration, test sample verification, standard equipment, and very precise instructions on sample preparation and measurement conditions, the collected data is absolutely worthless.
"3.Ban patents on any genetic sequence or chemical compound found in nature. (so a pharma company that finds a new medicine in a plant in the amazon jungle does not get to claim a patent over that medicine or any genes in the plant responsible for producing that chemical). Chemicals and gene sequences created in a lab would still be eligible for patent protection though. Should it be discovered (and verified) that the complete chemical or genetic sequence does exist in nature and that the occurrence could not have come from the lab-produced version, that evidence would count as prior art and could be used as such under point 1 above."
That means that immediately no pharma company will any longer invest in the extraction, identification, characterization and modification of pharmacologically active compounds from any biological source. This will stop progress, from historical aspirin (originally isolated from tree bark) to recent important innovations in malaria and cancer treatment (artemisinin, taxoles) or pain management (cone snail toxins). A large part of drug research is inspired by what has been found in nature, and if you fear that even if you work with a modified substance somebody might find later that modified compound in some other species, or in minimal previously overlooked concentration, and then you'ld lose you USD 500 Mil development investment nobody is going to take at risk any longer.
Of course anything published, in any reasonably accessible medium, before the filing date of a patent (and Open Source is here actually the prime example, because it is so simple to show that it was in the wild before the filing date) is prior art and invalidates any patents filed on its algorithms later.
Contrary to what scare mongers imply here, Open Source clearly gains from this.
These mirrors are pretty thick, and when glued on the surface of the dish, he actually ended up with the mirror surface being out of alignment, so the focus point is far more smeared than that of the original, precisely designed and aligned dish.
The proper thing to do would have been to chemically deposit a very thin silver layer on the dish surface. This is actually not difficult to achieve. The mentioned spray paint or aluminum foil solutions are also better than his really, really crude approach.
Maybe practical feasibility has improved in the meantime with advances in computer and sensor technologies, but SARTRE is certainly nowhere as innovative as people seem to think here.
One of the most spectacular failures during the wild technology startup stampede a decade ago in Germany. They burned several hundred millions before folding.
The only remaining legacy is a huge indoor pool in their former airship hangar...
This is the standard required by US immigration for foreign biometric passports.
And only with these you can take advantage of visa-waiver (minus ESTA, minus new tourism support fee) entry into the US.
So either your passport supports this, or you can make an appointment weeks in advance at a select US consulate in a city only a few hundred kilometers away if you want to travel.
It seems you have never heard of LIMS (Laboratory Information Systems), which is unfortunate.
This is a thriving software sector, and you are actually expected to be at least vaguely familiar with these kind of systems should you ever transfer to industry and work in data-generating or data-processing positions.
Nobody in industry keeps experimental data as individual, handcrafted datasets. The risk of losing important data, not not being able to make cross-references (patents!) is much too high if you let people run their own set-ups. Do yourself, and your research group, a favor: Get some grant money and purchase a robust commercial set-up at least for your group, or better your department. Entry level systems, with academic discounts, are affordable. There are no competitive open-source solutions.
Start your research here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIMS
(though the systems listed there are instrument-centric, if you are more into generic chemistry there are other standard package by companies such as Accelrys and CambridgeSoft).
a sunscreen with enough chemicals added to allow any photolyase molecules from the lotion to permeate into my damaged skin cells.
Any large proteins just slapped onto the skin just stay there, and have no perceivable effect (assuming absence of active transport mechanisms, attack to the cell membrane, etc., which I can confidently exclude in this case).
If you add permeation helpers to destabilize the skin cell membranes sufficiently to allow uptake into the cells, the stuff gets so nasty that any positive effects will certainly far be outweighed by negative side effects.
The interior of a buckyball (even the larger variants with C70+) is too small to hold any molecule of pharmacological interest. One or two metal ions, yes, even ammonia, methane and similar small molecules (all known), but nothing beyond that. The only payload with some potential usefulness are radioactive metal atoms for radiation therapy, but certainly not normal drugs.
Slashdot Mirror
No graphene anywhere in this (or any other) plane. You are confusing something.
The composite material are carbon fibers (essentially burned nylon), not graphene, nanotubes, buckyballs or anything similarly exotic. This is then drenched in polymer resin and backed. The polymer resin is the heaviest component in the overall composition.
How is this "invention" different from the established product BASF Micronal which has been available for a couple of years?
http://www.basf.com/group/corporate/en/brand/MICRONAL_PCM
Platinum complexes are a standard treatment for many cancers. They intercalate in DNA, especially in rapidly dividing cells, and block DNA transscription.
These contain isolated (but complexed) metal atoms, though, not nanoparticles. I do not know whether these compounds could also serve as effective electron sources on X-ray irradiation, or whether they might form nanoparticles in a tumor cell, or outside dead cells after killing them in their primary therapeutic function.
No reputable agency will let you sign up for just one or two months for service in a really foreign place. Preparation courses alone take already more time than that.
I suggest you find something useful to do locally.
I can imagine pulling off a successful IT start-up without formal education, but a biotech company (which is among the fields listed)?
You won't even get (legally) access to microorganisms and chemicals without excellent professional standing ... and I really do not see how you could get sufficiently self-educated for anything in this field beyond running a microbrewery....
Why is this kid having different results than what is documented already? If this work has been done already then this 16 year old's discoveries wouldn't be newsworthy now would they?
He is *not* having different results. That is the whole point.
Massive press hype, from reporters without science background who fell for the PR of the competition organizers.
You are forgetting that he was tutored by an academic, and winning first price in a competition sponsored by Big Pharma. Hardly outside the system.
There are X-ray structures of the protein(s) in question, with and without bound ligands. All published long before this guy started his work. And the drugs were designed by performing docking computations on the protein with the structure, and the most promising candidate structures were synthesized, binding verified, and some of them again solved as crystal structure. By looking at the docking poses, the structures were further refined by re-designing parts to better fit the protein.
Many posters here are assuming he worked on his own, brilliantly and single-mindedly breaking a new path. He did not. He worked in an academic lab and was tutored. The prof was of course well aware of the state of research. He had a bright pupil interested in learning about doing research. So he offered him to learn some of the tools of trade, on a realistic sample problem with known outcome. The guy went to work, learned a lot, made a nice poster (for a highschol student competition, not a scientific conference), and won a price for it. All very laudable and a nice achievement, but no ground-breaking genius moment.
Just to re-iterate it, the guy did not find anything which was not already known and published. He used known protein structures, known drug compounds, known binding sites, known ideas for combining drugs. So there was no original scientific research, and absolutely no novel cure, just ridiculous hype by the press. The guy mastered at age of 16 skills chemistry students are routinely acquiring at 22. Nice, but not world-shaking.
Yeah, but this is not how Slashdot works.
0 score for you! (not from me, obviously)...
No need to foam.
I already praised his efforts in another post. He did well, spent a lot of effort, learned something, and hopefully he will be motivated to study chemistry in university by this experience.
But he did not perform original research, and certainly did not find a cure for CF. He reproduced stuff well known among professionals. He certainly did not discover anything they overlooked.
Its the hype in the article and the Slashdot summary I am protesting against.
Thank you for so clearly demostrating what's wrong with the Pharmaceutical industry. First they brute-force through computer simulations looking for combinations that might work, then they file patents on those results as if they had done any actual research, and then just to add salt to the wound they don't even bring them to market and into the hands of patients or this kid wouldn't have even tried to do this experiment in the first place.
But then again, this is the kind of industry that blackmails governments for a living and even patents freakin' DNA so really, it shouldn't be surprising.
You are mistaken. The Vertex compounds are now in phase 3 clinical trials and will be marketed if nothing bad shows up (and if it did, it would be a financial disaster, Vertex and various foundations spent well over 100 mil USD on this project). Drugs without FDA approval (or the Canadian equivalent) cannot yet be bought in a pharmacy, that is the law. But be assured, Vertex certainly wants them on the market - otherwise there will be no recovery of expenses, and later proft.
Finally, drug combinations can only be tested in trials when the underlying single-compound drugs have been shown to be effective and safe.
The Vertex people did, and they rightfully received much praise for their results (these CF compounds are without precedent, providing a treatment option for a deadly disease).
But this has all been published, extensively, even in non-specialist journals (CE&N). *EVERY* professional chemist with a minimum interest in pharma research knows about the Vertex compounds, the different interaction points with the proteins, and the possibility of drug combinations.
Reproducing these results is a nice coursework problem, but not research. The novel results produced by what the guy did are ZERO. I am certain this project was a nice experience for him, and it may hopefully motivate him to study chemistry after finishing school. I wish him the very best for his further career.
But HE DEFINITELY DID NOT INVENT A CURE. Stating anything like that is ridiculous hype!
Sorry, but this is *not* any innovative science. Rather, it is a computational reproduction of facts already well known. Nothing more than a typical molecular modeling class assignment during a graduate chemistry education.
He did not invent any new drugs - the really breakthrough was by the researchers of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, see for example VX-770.
He did not discover the mechanism of action of the drugs. Rather, he took published protein structures and published compounds and re-ran some docking studies (of the same type Vertex and other pharmaceutical companies probably spend hundreds of thousands of processor hours on, with the difficulty that they had to check tens of thousands of compounds, not just two already known to work).
He was not the first to notice that different promising compounds in clinical trials have different points of interaction with the defective proteins of CF. Thinking that a drug combination may be useful is not exactly a new and brilliant insight, and this was for example even discussed a couple of months ago in CE&N (the general chemistry member journal of the American Chemical Society). I am very confident that is has been evaluated before, and probably there are patents already filed.
The only interesting point here is that the guy is 16,not 20 or 22 like the normal chemistry student. But then pressing the right buttons in a molecular modeling software is really not that difficult, especially when you already know the outcome you want to reproduce.
Why are posts of people demonstrably without knowledge rated "insightful" ?
"If the radiation detector is built with the proper non-removable shield then they will only be able to measure useful types of radiation"
Sorry, but such a shielding does not exist (in handheld devices, if you are willing to literally invest in a ton of electromagnets, this is a different matter).
In order to measure alpha particles, there must be the smallest possible amount of matter between the outside world and the detector. Your naive proposal in a post below to wrap the counter into a plastic bag which is swapped regularly to keep things clean results effectively in a 100% alpha radiation shield around your detector.
The problem is that alpha radiation from inhaled aerosol particles is the most dangerous component of what a broken reactor emits, and thus this it what really needs to be determined. If the radiation is blocked by a plastic bag, or dead outer skin cells, it is pretty harmless. But if you inhale, or eat, an alpha emitter and it makes a cell in your lung or stomach lining go cancerous, this is a very different matter.
So you want to shield the counter, and only measure beta and gamma, you are making the data even more useless than original (see my explanation before). Not what I call an "insightful" post.
Using curse words does not prove any competence.
I do actually have radiochemistry training, and your arguments show that you do not have any significant domain expertise at all. But this has never stopped anybody from posting, or insulting people, has it?
Hand-held Geiger counters, as shown on the picture in the article, and this is what I presume will be distributed, are only useful for very limited scenarios, such as
a) It's ticking, I should not go any deeper into this reactor housing/nuclear explosion ground
b) It's ticking. I spilled something on the lab bench/I stepped into something and should decontaminate.
c) Measure something really well mixed, like Radon gas in basements, or clean analytical solutions (*not* anything from ponds or puddles, the radioactive isotopes are generally adsorbed to colloidal matter in these samples, and that brings all kinds of problems). For the latter, use a well-defined sample volume and measurement geometry for reproducible readings.
As for the diluted fallout from a reactor, that is very, very different from those scenarios. We are mostly talking about solid aerosol particles, in deposited form or drifting with the wind, which are very unevenly distributed, tend to accumulate in unexpected places, and generally stick to matter.
So this is NOT
- atmospheric monitoring. Radon or other well-distributed radioactive gases are a very minor factor
- fixed and standardized geometry. The picture in the article shows somebody pointing a counter to the ground. This may or may not a location where the average concentration has been enhanced or diluted. And with gamma rays, the normal square distance law applies, so minimal distance variations have a large effect. For alpha and beta, the distance law has an even higher power, because the particles collide with air molecules, or water droplets in the air.
- Cleanliness is a very major factor, and not just for the case of somebody sticking a counter into a puddle. If you just put a counter onto a mast, a radioactive aerosol particle may or may not deposit on the surface of the counter - and then stick. If it sticks, it will overpower any other radiation background, just because it is so much closer to the counter, and give much exaggerated readings. If nothing happens to fall on the counter, it will underestimate the dangers- if a radioactive alpha or beta particle is drifting by within just a few centimeters, hardly anything will register because of the very limited range of this type of radiation. Air-borne aerosol contamination can only be measured reliably by sucking large, measured amounts of air through a well-defined filter, and then measuring the radiation of the filter. Simple hand-held devices are completely useless for this purpose, even if they are dusted of weekly.
- In any case, the most important task will likely be to identify hot spots *on the ground, or in water*, where major aerosol deposits have accumulated, probably aided by solution/evaporation processes, and then treat these, before they get airborne again.
Measuring radiation is not as simple as measuring a temperature (and even that is something nobody wants to entrust an amateur with for the purpose of weather forecasts, etc.).
Depending on sample geometry, distance to sample, even atmospheric conditions for alpha/beta radiation, not to forget cleanliness of the counter, measurements can easily be different by a factor of 1000 or more (!) if you just hand a counter to a lay person and ask him/her to determine some radiation level out in the nature.
Without calibration, test sample verification, standard equipment, and very precise instructions on sample preparation and measurement conditions, the collected data is absolutely worthless.
"3.Ban patents on any genetic sequence or chemical compound found in nature. (so a pharma company that finds a new medicine in a plant in the amazon jungle does not get to claim a patent over that medicine or any genes in the plant responsible for producing that chemical). Chemicals and gene sequences created in a lab would still be eligible for patent protection though. Should it be discovered (and verified) that the complete chemical or genetic sequence does exist in nature and that the occurrence could not have come from the lab-produced version, that evidence would count as prior art and could be used as such under point 1 above."
That means that immediately no pharma company will any longer invest in the extraction, identification, characterization and modification of pharmacologically active compounds from any biological source. This will stop progress, from historical aspirin (originally isolated from tree bark) to recent important innovations in malaria and cancer treatment (artemisinin, taxoles) or pain management (cone snail toxins). A large part of drug research is inspired by what has been found in nature, and if you fear that even if you work with a modified substance somebody might find later that modified compound in some other species, or in minimal previously overlooked concentration, and then you'ld lose you USD 500 Mil development investment nobody is going to take at risk any longer.
Of course anything published, in any reasonably accessible medium, before the filing date of a patent (and Open Source is here actually the prime example, because it is so simple to show that it was in the wild before the filing date) is prior art and invalidates any patents filed on its algorithms later.
Contrary to what scare mongers imply here, Open Source clearly gains from this.
These mirrors are pretty thick, and when glued on the surface of the dish, he actually ended up with the mirror surface being out of alignment, so the focus point is far more smeared than that of the original, precisely designed and aligned dish.
The proper thing to do would have been to chemically deposit a very thin silver layer on the dish surface. This is actually not difficult to achieve. The mentioned spray paint or aluminum foil solutions are also better than his really, really crude approach.
A very similar approach was already pursued in 1998 by Volkswagen in their "Convoy-Pilot" project.
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-7907540.html (German)
Maybe practical feasibility has improved in the meantime with advances in computer and sensor technologies, but SARTRE is certainly nowhere as innovative as people seem to think here.
Remember Cargo Lifter?
One of the most spectacular failures during the wild technology startup stampede a decade ago in Germany. They burned several hundred millions before folding.
The only remaining legacy is a huge indoor pool in their former airship hangar...
This is the standard required by US immigration for foreign biometric passports.
And only with these you can take advantage of visa-waiver (minus ESTA, minus new tourism support fee) entry into the US.
So either your passport supports this, or you can make an appointment weeks in advance at a select US consulate in a city only a few hundred kilometers away if you want to travel.
It seems you have never heard of LIMS (Laboratory Information Systems), which is unfortunate.
This is a thriving software sector, and you are actually expected to be at least vaguely familiar with these kind of systems should you ever transfer to industry and work in data-generating or data-processing positions.
Nobody in industry keeps experimental data as individual, handcrafted datasets. The risk of losing important data, not not being able to make cross-references (patents!) is much too high if you let people run their own set-ups. Do yourself, and your research group, a favor: Get some grant money and purchase a robust commercial set-up at least for your group, or better your department. Entry level systems, with academic discounts, are affordable. There are no competitive open-source solutions.
Start your research here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIMS
(though the systems listed there are instrument-centric, if you are more into generic chemistry there are other standard package by companies such as Accelrys and CambridgeSoft).
a sunscreen with enough chemicals added to allow any photolyase molecules from the lotion to permeate into my damaged skin cells.
Any large proteins just slapped onto the skin just stay there, and have no perceivable effect (assuming absence of active transport mechanisms, attack to the cell membrane, etc., which I can confidently exclude in this case).
If you add permeation helpers to destabilize the skin cell membranes sufficiently to allow uptake into the cells, the stuff gets so nasty that any positive effects will certainly far be outweighed by negative side effects.
The interior of a buckyball (even the larger variants with C70+) is too small to hold any molecule of pharmacological interest. One or two metal ions, yes, even ammonia, methane and similar small molecules (all known), but nothing beyond that. The only payload with some potential usefulness are radioactive metal atoms for radiation therapy, but certainly not normal drugs.