CharonY

That is nonsense. First, as background, animals cannot synthesize B12, only bacteria (and archaea) can do that. In fact a lot of bacteria, including free-living ones are able to synthesize it de novo, as they also need it. From there it follows that folks do not need to harvest animals at all. And in fact some of the first production strains were soil bacteria including Sinorhizobium meliloti and Pseudomonas denitrificans but there have been efforts to make E. coli a better production strain (I am not sure how far they got). Feel free to look up the species together with industrial B12 fermentation, it should give you plenty of publications. The second part that your friend does not get is that in industrial fermentation you want to have a pure culture whenever possible to ensure a clean product. So if you have a production strain isolated, you keep a stock of them from which you can create fresh cultures whenever needed. Isolating a pure strain from a mixed sample (such as isolated from an animal) is a ton of work and may end up not giving you a working culture so there is no reason to do so. From what you have written it is rather obvious that your friend has spent no time reading up on how industrial fermentation actually works. The use of animal microbiota is something done in traditional food production (e.g. using cow rennet). However the key enzyme (chymosin) can now be produced industrially, without killing cows (again by using bacteria produce them).

I have a hard time seeing a good reason for doing that. Aggressive contact tracing is the best way to keep things open while slowing down spread. Not doing that is basically like putting a blindfold while going full throttle down the highway.

Technically it could be news, but rather baffling, the CDC has changed public recommendation on who should be tested. On some parts of the website they recommended: Specifically, they stated reasonably: But now the website reads: Now it is likely that the ability of testing is getting overwhelmed (again), but testing folks, especially potential asymptomatic spreaders should be very high on any testing hierarchy. It is really just baffling to me why they would do that. Edit: one thought might be that with limited testing available one cannot test folks repeatedly (as in other countries), and if only one shot is possible, it might make sense to delay the test until they can see positive results. But that is not really what is written there, either.

A thought would be to use thin layer chromatography. The nice thing is that you create plates that show the separated compounds.

Well the whole thing is like a knockoff copy of a real presidency, so of course.

Attitudes such as these have led to over 800 thousand deaths and counting. It also the reason why folks do not vaccinate against influenza and thereby needlessly increasing death rates. It would only be sad, if folks who adhere to these beliefs were also the victims. Unfortunately dealing with diseases is a community effort.

I am not sure what that would bring. Bacteriophages are viruses targeting bacteria..? Again, your immune system would only be primed against a pathogen if you are exposed to either the actual pathogen or a very closely related strain (i.e. the way vaccines work). Just being exposed to something else would not help (but as mentioned, could reduce unspecific immune responses and perhaps reduce allergies and autoimmune diseases).

A few points regarding the NanoDrop. It is convenient and you use a tiny amount of sample. But for precise quantification it is not very useful regardlesss of contamination in the sample. Considering the low volumes you pipet, the DNA (and other stuff) is often not homogenously distributed. So drop-to-drop variation is often very high and we generally do not use it beyond rough purity estimates, regardless of the sample. That being said, one big question is whether your goal is accurate absolute DNA quantification, reproducible quantification and/or also knowledge on purity. And of course the type of extraction you use, the buffer and additives and so on can influence you quantification in various ways all on top of your source material. Then there are experimental conditions (such as concentration regime, are samples limited, what is the budget, how much time to invest, cost of downstream applications etc.) which all determine which methods are more useful or not.

Well, yes, but infection risk for the most part (at least initially) is probably not a great concern. Human pathogens generally do not live in soil and viruses need a host to propagate. So the most likely scenario I could think of would be coming into contact with carcasses that have been infected and preserved. Not impossible but not very likely, either.

Bad idea for a whole range of reasons. The most obvious one is that putting opportunistic pathogens into areas where they belong can facilitate colonization and infection by said pathogen. Lung tissue is especially vulnerable and putting bacteria in there where they do not belong is a really, really bad idea. Even normal members of the biota can be dangerous when there is some upset in the balance.

You realize that Wolbachia hosts are invertebrates and in those are not exactly harmless (and conversely, if they could colonize humans they would likely not be harmless anymore)? Also that the immune system in invertebrates is quite different from mammals?

I believe Indonesia is fairly high up there, too. I think in the Pacific space a lot of older languages have been preserved withing isolated communities. Would be interesting to read up on that.

Considering that language is constantly evolving with new words being invented every time something new shows up, I am not sure what a vocabulary count is supposedly to show. Other perhaps than the mechanisms with which a given language creates new meaning. Some use loanwords (such as コンピューター for computer), others derive it from difference concepts. E.g. computer or the German word "Rechner" which both are derived from similar meanings (computare, calculating). Whereas in Chinese the computer is a brand new creation- 电脑 (literally electricity brain). I think there is a term for trying to make value judgements based on badly implementing quantitative approaches to linguistics, but the word eludes me right now. Anyhow, the thread has mostly discussed why the question in OP is mostly meaningless, anyway, so it has moved on to more interesting bits. The official body is English, but there are so-called national adhering organizations which are kind of the officials that translate these IUPAC standards.

Why often repeated, it is worthwhile to add that evolution is not about anything. It is just the consequence of the way genetics and reproduction works.

Define weak in this regard. Especially among younger folks death has been associated with a too strong immune response. You might be thinking of social Darwinism, which is not a biological concept. It is not about strength, it is about reproductive success. Leopards are at risk of extinction. Rabbits not so much.

I think is there might be a bit of misconception here. The immune system is not like a muscle that deteriorates with disuse. What you seem to refer to is often termed the hygiene hypothesis. However, what it means is that if you are not exposed to foreign antigens, what happens is that your immune system may overreact and then react overly harsh to something it perceives as harmful, even if it isn't. As such it is a hypothesis that tries to explain things like autoimmune disorders or allergies. But it generally does not apply to infectious diseases. There is basically one exception, when it comes to related diseases. Specifically, if you develop immunity against a disease, there is a chance that some of the antigens you are exposed to, might also be conserved among similar diseases. For example, coronaviruses have certain similar structures (e.g. certain parts of the nucleocapsid). So there is the possibility that if you have been exposed to a less harmful coronavirus, you might be have developed antibodies against to to others, too. However in case of SARS-CoV-2 there has (to my knowledge) no verified cases yet.

There are different types of stress that correlate with different measures. There is also a difference between physiological stress responses (such as the mentioned cortisol levels) and the (mental) perception of stress. In other words, one has to define rather narrowly what one wants to figure out as something like universal stress does not exist as such. For example, there are wearable devices out there that indicate stress using ECGs and EMGs, but typically they are only somewhat predictive of immediate stressful situations (i.e. time-limited fluctuations above a baseline). Cortisol can also be indicative of long-term (i.e. chronic) stress, however the baseline levels need to be established for each individual and can be quite tricky. Many indicators undergo changes during the day or are heavily influenced by other physiological changes making data-driven diagnoses difficult. There are plenty of studies including on wearables that OP might want to look into. Much of the recent focus has been on the data analysis side rather than the measurement side. I.e. can we use the wealth of collected physiological data (e.g. from wearables or other sources) to accurately predict the physiological state of the individual? While there are folks selling it quite successfully, my reading is much more skeptical on that matter for now.

I would posit that the current presidency is sufficiently weird to make historic precedence an unreliable predictor.

There are also structural differences- there was a prominent case in the US when a police officer tried to talk down an suicidal person who was carrying a gun (but without ammunition). Other officers ultimately shot the man but the office who tried to de-escalate was branded a coward and ultimately terminated.

I think that is an important distinction. From what I have seen armed police in the UK usually engage in situations which go beyond situations where deadly force by police are considered justified in the US. There appears a large gap between what is considered a threat in the UK vs in NA.

Generally speaking there is no selective pressure to maintain incompatibility. Quite the reverse, actually. Factors that introduce incompatibility (i.e. increase infertility in certain pairings) are more likely selected against, as the potential mating pool decreases. If in the same habitat, there is more likely of intermixing and maintenance of some level of compatibility is a likely scenario. Once separated, the genetic pools can drift further apart.

Trying to extrapolate effects in biology are often difficult- there is little evidence that action potential velocity leads to better processing. There are a lot of constraints (including energetic ones) and I think the physiological consequences are unclear. That being said, axon diameter actually do show some dynamics. Neurofilaments regulate axon dimensions and swelling has been observed during action potential generation as well as via mechanical tension of the cytoskeleton. Intuitively it makes sense to increase action potential velocity in connections that are heavily used rather than broad range increase which might mess up timing and activity coordination.

! Moderator Note We do not provide medical advice here, you should ask you medical provider about your symptoms. And no, having certain bacteria inside of you will not make you suddenly resistant to diseases (and vaccines do not work that way). Wash you hands and keep your distance instead.

I think this ongoing pandemic is going to be an interesting lesson for how we do things in the future. One is that we just go back and do things as usual. Here, I a fear that we will (again) become complacent until the next pandemic happens within, say, 5-20 years. The other is that at least some things may change permanently, as it already has happened in some countries to various degrees in the past, such as more common use of facemasks, re-thinking of hand hygiene and so on. As whole I think this test run has shown many deficiencies, including the fact that warnings are generally ignored until it is too late. On the positive side I have never seen such a massive engagement of the global research community to tackle an issue from all kind of fronts.

T cell responses (especially T helper cells CD4) are an important element of the immune memory. A few studies have now found that convalescent folks with mild or no symptoms show detectable T cell responses, which is positive news. (Sekine et al. 2020 Cell (preproof); biorxiv: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.26.115832v1). A couple of other preliminary studies seem to suggest that even antibody responses may be present for longer than previously anticipated (e.g. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.01.20166553v1, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.11.20171843v2) . So we are seeing an increasing number of studies that suggest that responses are at least detectable for about 3 months. Obviously, we only know the full scope way later, but at least there is more evidence that vaccination might turn out to be be a viable strategy.