The article was pretty fun. I had my own idea once on these lines:

Leukemia is sometimes treated by removing bone marrow from the patient and then using drugs to kill the leukemic cells, leaving normal blood stem cells alive. The patient's body is then irradiated to kill the rest of their bone marrow, and the extracted stem cells are injected into the bone to re-populate it. (or a bone marrow transplant is performed). The idea is that the largely non-living structure of the bone will be retained, and will provide a scaffold on which the healthy cells will establish themselves.

One day, I was looking at a tree that was riddled with the holes left by some kind of beetle. The beetle larvae killed the tree, but the dead wood retained the overall shape of the tree when it was alive. Trees are made largely of non-living material, with a thin layer of living cells called the cambium layer (not to be confused with the cambrian layer, which is a geologic stratum formed half a billion years ago). If the living cells of the cambium could be extracted and grown in cell culture, an infected tree could then be irradiated to kill off invading beetles. The cells could then be re-introduced into the cambium layer to re-populate the structure of the tree and restore it to its healthy, living condition.

Unlike humans, though, a tree cannot be moved into a nuclear medicine facility for radiation treatments. Some means would be needed to bring the irradiation to the tree. Happily, our military already developed the notorious neutron bomb. Remember, this bomb is able to kill all living things, but leave buildings intact. Bark beetle (or fungal disease) infections of trees never occur in isolation, but are area-wide effects, which are just the right scale for the neutron bomb. A forest that is suffering from an infestation could be sterilized by neutron bomb, and then the trees could be revitalized by infiltration with new cells.

By extension, whole neighborhoods could be rid of pests, such as roaches, termites, fire ants, bedbugs or rodents by evacuating the people and their pets, followed by a neutron bomb blast. Minor structural damage could be repaired, and then people could return. They would have to re-seed their lawns and gardens, but would start from a clean slate, pest-wise.

Friedersdorf did this in 2011 as well
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/05/nearly-100-fantastic-pieces-of-journalism/238230/
The selections are really great, and they are satisfyingly long reads, and include this piece:

THE NEW YORKER
Letting Go by Atul Gawande
"Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions--and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left."

This marketing strategy of trapping people in a 'product ecosystem' is one of the things that I most dislike about Apple. They make high-quality and tightly-integrated products, but you're shackled to their world forever after.

As I like to say, we may enjoy the view from the shoulders of giants, but it sure was a chore climbing up their pants.

Those horizontal rectangular pupils just creep me out.

I never understood why the guys in the engineering shop called that truck the "dooly". I am so glad that I never asked!

That titanic daikon radish will never eat another human!
Also . . . hooray for SketchUp!

Insect vectors kill humans indirectly, though. Instead of "Tsetse fly", they should list "Trypanosome", for instance.

That's one greedy fish! It had already eaten a frog, but couldn't resist a lure for dessert.

http://www.ebugco.com/pages/bugbox.html
All it needs is a little hole to put a cup of dipping sauce.

They also come in convenient packaging for snacks on-the-go!

When I was in the fifth grade, one of my teachers was a former police officer. During our P.E. class, he had us do a number of exercises, which he would direct by calling out their names (running in place, sit-ups, etc).
At one point, he called for "Side-straddle hops", which resulted in our general confusion. We stood in the field, not knowing what he asked for. He decided to demonstrate, and we immediately identified the exercise as "Jumping Jacks".
I guessed that the name was not used by the LAPD Academy because it sounded silly.

I see a Disney movie coming up with this. Kind of like "Cool Runnings".
Plucky girl and her cow aim for Olympics Dressage.