CharonY

As a side note, in Germany it is usually expected that votes normally are along party lines, only when the party leader makes it free to vote one's conscience (as it happened recently for a same-sex marriage) are major breaks expected and/or tolerated. This is quite different to what the US used to be. However, that implies that the GOP strategy is more to act like a party in parliamentary systems with stronger party control over votes.

There are no superior or inferior genes. Just genes. They interact with each other and (indirectly) with the environment. Whether the interaction is beneficial or not is a moving target. Inbreeding is a big issue, however as they increase the likelihood of genetic defects. It is not equal among all phyla, obviously as simpler organisms and plants tend to be more resilient. And of course there are asexually propagating organisms which play by somewhat different rules. Trying to split up human in-species diversity along the lines you do makes little sense. Our highest diversity is found within Africa, which is in line with our current understanding of human migration.

Pretty much the same everywhere. Process is not faster, just the approval due to the emergency. It also means we have led data than for regular vaccines. What it did, however was focus more efforts into a single disease, which otherwise would have spread across different research questions.

I think not recommending to self-medicate with random chemicals falls more under common sense rather than medical advice.

! Moderator Note While this is speculation, it is still part of the science forums. As there is no science to be discussed, the thread is locked.

It is a matter of concentration. Very very small amounts are can be harmless, but LD50 doses (i.e. concentration at which half of all animals died) is around 90 mg/kg, when taken orally. This is for acute effects and I am not sure about long-term issues. Perhaps more importantly, there is no evidence that drinking it has any protective or curative properties on the body. I.e. it is indeed a health risk without any known benefits.

What you are looking for is called circadian rhythms. The controls are complex, it is not that temperature directly accelerates or changes the rhythm, though. It would wreak havoc with our metabolism. Rather it is thermoregulation within our body that affects circadian rhythms on the cellular level. The archetypical master regulator is light, which sends signal via the brain but it also sends signals affecting thermoregulation (i.e. core temp increases with awakeness). Changes in core temperature the results in affects in the rest of your body, basically synching it up so that your whole body is within a given cycle of the rhythm. Edit: as iNow noted, there is a temperature sensitive element to it, however it is synched up in a mostly unknown way (at least AFAIK, it is not my area of expertise) to the mostly temp insensitive core body temp rhythms. I.e. the overall cycle remains constant, at different temperatures, but the timing can be shifted.

I think the implication is that it is based on the assumptions within a given theoretical framework. I.e. we are comparing biological hypotheses with each other for the most part. And even there, a molecular question will have different competing hypotheses than organismal or ecosystem-wide ones.

Fundamentally I think it does not matter who said it, it is just an attractive way to select among alternative hypotheses without having more data. The reductionist approach allows us to test least amount of parameters first and add more if it does not conform to the experimental outcome. In principle it is also related to the concept of falsifiability in science. We generally are not able to falsify all potential alternatives, thus we try to start with a minimal framework that we can test rather than going for more complex ones, if they do not have more explanatory power. However, I am not sure whether it is really a matter of true or not, there is no formal logic (that I am aware of) that underlies it. Rather it is one of the useful rule of thumbs that you can apply in complex situations.

In addition, folks are going to die from something. Also, folks react more to things that have (seemingly) quick strategies to address, whereas as issues such as cancer and coronary heart disease require long-term changes which most are uncomfortable doing. In addition chronic respiratory disease can be linked to air quality, but we are not really doing enough to improve that either. And even then, COVID-19 in the US has overtake coronary heart disease as cause of death for a few weeks and there are still folks denying its very existence. So there is that.

Which from an external viewpoint is pretty much the same (as usually diagnostic scoring improves). That being said, most folks engage to some level of masking and in many cases practice can make it slightly less energy consuming.

Well and there are reports that Trump might have been groomed as a Russian asset since the 80s. https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-cultivating-trump-asset-40-years-says-ex-kgb-spy-2021-1

I think it is important to acknowledge that autism itself does not reverse, and may not make a lot of sense to think of it that way. Autism is associated with a number of altered functions and to various degree these can improve or decline over time. For example, increased engagement can result in vastly improved verbal skills in persons with autism. It does not mean that they do not have the underlying cause anymore, they just improved their ability to the point where the symptoms are not visible anymore. E.g. they are often prone to faster decline under unfavourable conditions. Likewise what is often described as psychopathy is not merely a lack of empathy, rather lack of empathy is one of the various symptoms. The combination of these various symptoms are then often used to characterize folks into groups such as antisocial personality disorder, dissocial personality disorder and so on. So here again the question would rather be, can the symptoms be reversed. A few symptoms can be improved. For example, folks in this spectrum of disorders often have learning deficits (including short attention span). Training seems to improve these functions. Folks with antisocial personality disorder tend to have slightly different characteristics than those using the psychopathy diagnosis scheme (e.g. more issues with working memory). But again, as a whole the conditions are not reversible.

I think that shows how broken everything is. Violent insurrection with direct threat to GOP officials should have been the last straw. Instead, even slightly critical GOP officials are backtracking on all fronts. It is scary to think that for a particular segment there appears to be impossible to have any political consequences even for extreme actions anymore. It seems to legitimize (right-wing) extremism and I am wondering what long-lasting damages that is going to do.

The only thing I would object to is that starting date. Many aspects of science, including biomedical, have been politicized for much longer. As you mentioned vaccines, abortion, birth control, GMOs and so on have all been target of politicization for far longer. The issue was always if there science clashes with something that folks strongly believe in it takes a backseat. Political parties often have built identities around those issues (or it organically formed around them, depending on where you are).

While there is some truth to that, I found that the superficial knowledge type is increasingly prevalent. I.e. the one where you learn to parrot keywords that they regurgitate once they see a question that seems to be peripheral to it. Folks follow lectures and/or view youtube videos on a topic and feel that they understand things, but barely ever put time to reflect on the topic and try to explain it to themselves or others. They get frustrated if they are not getting spoon-fed everything (e.g. terms on slides they need to follow up) and so on. I do think information consumption has changed quite a bit and so far I have not found any educator who had a good plan to deal with it. Perhaps a new generation of instructors will be fine with it. But it looks like the trend is really towards making folks entertained while feeling they learned something rather than dealing with the material at depth. The shift to online learning really shows how the student work, and unfortunately it is mostly putting the questions into google, fora, or discord servers and hoping someone else has the answers...

That is a myth for the most part. Friedman had a great quote for that: It is the assumption that jobs are a fixed commodity and hence increase in labour would decrease its value. However, it is in fact elastic. With more folks entering the workforce, consumption also increases, which in turns stimulates the economy. While there can be depressing effects locally and short-term, the effects long-term and globally are usually either neutral or positive (i.e. net increase in wages) based on empirical studies. For example a paper by Weinstein (2017; J Reg Sci 57:4 591-610) found after adjusting for regional differences that an increase in labor participation of women in the workforce between 1980 and 2010 increased wages, for both men and women.

It sounds to me that it might be about folks who profess a superficial love for science or anything sounding "sciency" (or like science ficton-y) but do not have actual interests in that area as such. Essentially folks that assume that liking science memes being the same as liking science. I also disagree that one needs to have a higher degree to get into science. There are many hobbies that provide in-depth knowledge about certain parts of that natural words, including e.g. bird watching or wildlife photography. It is more about to what depth you involve yourself into it. Fundamentally anyone running an aquarium or doing birdwatching is learning and applying more science that self-professed geeks who want to use Crispr to make superhumans.

Fundamentally the mindset of most students and parents (as well as many teachers) has become grade-oriented. Folks confuse grades with understanding the material and looking at students just entering college it is clear that few have developed deep interests or even reading skills. Over the years it has become apparent that learning is paper-thin to the test and students have been adept in further optimizing the process. In student evaluations you see an increase in complaints that instructors teach too much, which in the end does not appear in tests. I.e. it shows a mindset where folks are highly focused on the grades as sole outcome, and anything not related to it (e.g. deepen understanding, or foundational knowledge that is important for higher classes) tend to get neglected. Traditionally this was more common in pre-meds, who optimize class selection in order to get into med school, but it seems to have affect majors, too now. Big issue there is that even in advanced classes you realize at some point that a big proportion of the class has no recollection of previous courses, they just learned for the test and after that it is gone. It could also be connected with how younger folks consume media and information in general, but sometimes a class seems to be full of amnesiacs. One can still shame individual students into re-learning bits when you recognize them from former classes, but as a whole I feel it has been getting harder over the last decade or so. There is also the mindset that the teacher's job is not to teach, but to facilitate high grades, which does not really help.

This is one of the questions where there are a large number of "correct" answers. Also I do not think that it can be answered by one or two papers. It is one of the fundamental questions of "omics" research. I.e. how do molecular changes on the transcriptome/proteome/metabolome level relate to physiological changes in the organism. In some cases where the mechanisms are well known you could indeed find pathways that can explain certain features. However, they are not necessarily protein-protein interactions. Metabolic pathways, for example, are connected via the metabolites rather than direct protein interactions (for the most part). But even identifying groups of genes involved in connected functions, it is often unclear how that affects the organism. Apoptosis, inflammation markers and so on are often indicative of damages of some sorts, but it does not necessarily tell you what kind of disease it is and how it causes these damages. For microarrays there are additional challenges as they generally only indicate relative changes, which may or may not relate to physiological outcomes. Even more problematic, an increase in mRNA does not necessarily indicate a similar increase in protein. If you go through papers using microarray or other "omics" techniques, you will often see that authors often use these techniques as mere screening methods to identify significant changes (which has its own set of issues) and then often use validation studies or literature to hypothesize what their connection to a disease or condition is. Other attempts are more quantitative, e.g. using a variety of modeling approaches, mostly using metabolomics and proteomics information, to reconstruct the metabolic pathways. This often is not as easy for other less well-known networks. As a whole these are open-ended questions and instead of focusing on right or wrong you might want to explore what we can or cannot learn from this type of data (it also leads into the issue of high-dimensional data sets).

As a whole qPCR tend to use fairly short target regions (usually <250 bp), this helps to keep amplification cycles really short and probes usually are only between 18-30 bp. Part of the limitation s that the labelled probe needs to be quenched and with longer probes it can cause issues. But they are ways around that (e.g. using free quenchers), so in theory one could design longer probes. But often that is not ideal for the performance of the assay. 30 bp or shorter is typically enough to be highly specific for a target gene within an organism, if run under sufficiently stringent conditions (your signal has to come from successful binding of the primers as well as a probe between them). However things get tricky when we are e.g. looking for SNPs in mixed samples. There are approaches for community analyses where probes can be designed to fit certain taxa, but obviously the require quite a bit of validation work. There is now a move toward doing more sequencing for validation, but despite cost reductions it may still be a bad hit to the budget.

Fundamentally PCR has not changed (let's just call it PCR, it is what it has been called forever). So not much has changed in diagnosis of the correct amplicon. But I think the confusion might be due to the fact that not all qPCRs are created equal. Some use intercalating dyes to detect double strand DNA and in this case, there is no real additional information of the amplicon over PCR (aside from a melting curve, which can be generated after the run and which is kind of helpful in that regard). However, there are qPCRs that use a probe that binds to the target region, similar to a Southern blot. That one is what the author refers to as being more specific.

Edit: I started typing some thoughts, but I am wondering what your thoughts are, first.

I think that is a reasonable assumption.

Well, the disorders stay. Management means that folks exhibit normative behavior (or emulate it). But it is not that the folks will suddenly feel empathy. They might learn that folks expect not to behave a certain way, but that is the best you can hope for. The issue with harm is that folks with certain antisocial disorders simply are unable to see that doing harm is a bad thing. It is like trying to cure blindness by telling folks to behave as if they were able to see. Both require ongoing management. What makes it really difficult is that folks with this disorder are unable to see that something is wrong to begin with. While they can learn to pretend, it is often difficult as typically they do not feel to the need to fit social norms and do not understand soecietal expectations. I think the otherness of the disorder is really difficult to convey as you and me would frame it in a context that makes sense to us, but for people with this disorder it simply would be gibberish. Again, it is part of their personality and cannot be changed and it is quite a different beast than, say, mental illnesses.