CharonY

! Moderator Note Discussion regarding free will has been split to a new thread.

There are a number of limitations. While they eventually degrade (under the right conditions) many persist for a long time and in waterways may not degrade there (or in the ocean). Some may degrade faster, but may not be very resilient. As a whole from what I understand there are no clear solutions available (yet).

Do you think that manufacturing has declined in the USA as a consequence?

! Moderator Note Considering that OP is about AI, can we please go back to that topic rather than other Sci-Fi inventions? Open a separate thread if there is a desire to explore this area further. Thank you very much.

Considering OP specified black tea, we can assume that the discussion is about the more oxidized tea versions (green tea are untreated and oolong are intermediate, roughly speaking). Most of the popular black in the UK are actually blends from black teas from different regions. Of course you can have purists who state that one might want to try the original teas first, to get an idea about the depth of their flavour. Typically, these unblended black teas are named after their origin. Well known examples include Assam, Keemun, Lapsang souchong, Assam, Darjeeling and Ceylon. However, unless they are single sourced they can still be blends to various degrees. One could argue whether blends of the same plant from the same region but from different estates are indeed blends or not, but they can also have different levels of oxidation and the resulting composition can have significantly altered taste (also, they can be producded in different regions, which further alters taste). The basic composition of Yorkshire tea seems to be a blend of black tea versions Assam, Ceylon and Kenyan black, yielding typically a robust flavour. All tea varieties are known for their bold taste which favoured in the UK as they can stand up to the addition of milk. Kenyan black tea and Assam often provide the earth, malty notes and Ceylon the slight citrusy undertones. Edit: As Prometheus pointed out, a typical breakfast blend. Pu-erh tea is interesting in terms of black teas. In Chinese, the typical British black tea would be called "red tea" . Pu-erh is a type of tea that is further (microbially) fermented yielding its characteristic taste. Perhaps confusingly, this tea is called a black/dark tea in Chinese but is not what one would consider a black tea in the English speaking world (I think it is often called dark tea, but am not sure). That all being said often times the processed teas are a bit generic in taste (especially when they come in form of bags). If you enjoy loose leaf tea, I would try to give less oxidized versions (including oolong as a great compromise) a chance as they bring out more mellow subtle flavours that are very interesting. Even if it turns out not to be your cup of tea (heh) it might help you explore what elements of the blend or flavour profile are what you really like. Examples including higher lower tanning content (bitterness), more floral (e.g. Keemun) or more malty (e.g. Asssam) and so on. You might then get an idea to source some really good teas (even from the same estate, they may be harvested at different times which e.g. affects tanning content) and then and make your own blend. For coffee, it is obviously precisely the same thing and it can be really fun (and tasty). However, depending on how deep you got into the rabbit hole, your wallet may not like it that much. Especially when regular teas in the supermarket somehow appear dull. I think addiction really kicks in at that point. please send help

How? Or more specifically, what should they have done to avoid that situation? To explore this question further, how do you think has manufacturing output in the USA changed between say, the 80s and today? What should the trend look like and what political/policy measures could be implemented to change the actual outcome from the desired one?

Confocal is still the workhorse, but a lot has been done on the mathematical side to get more information out of fluorescence patterns. Unmixing signals has become more reliable. In conjunction with lattice light sheet (LLS) instrumentation 3D live imaging has been conducted with high resolution. Developments such as Storm (stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy) allow breaking the resolution limit in brightfield (or PALM for a similar variation). Then there are correlative approaches combining fluorescence microscopy with other methods (e.g. SEM, TEM, AFM) which are quite nice. While there have been some developments on the technical side, many for the more interesting bits are combining physical approaches to improve upon what we can see (e.g. confocal/AFM; confocal SEM). Or the use of deconvolution strategies to resolve details and spectral overlaps. Other methods have been around for a while such as TIRF which also has an important niche. I could go on for days and would actually need time to think what I would really consider to be the most relevant or exciting developments. In addition, there are other analyticla methods such as immuno-affinity mass spectrometry which helps us identifying interactions and so on. Just as a side note, I think it is great that you try to keep up to date in order to inform your teaching. In my case I have to do it anyway for my research, but find it sometimes difficult to infuse that into lower level courses. As such I imagine it even more challenging (and admirable) to do it on the high school level.

I guess that would refer to tadpole shrimps? They also show high diversification despite overall morphological conservation. I did not come across the shark thingy, though.

Obviously that is somewhat tongue in cheek, but I do know of colleagues with Mexican passports but valid work visas who had trouble re-entering for unclear reasons. Though obviously having a Canadian passport would trump that issue (I imagine, at least). Also there is the weird difference between European brown and Latin American (or middle Eastern brown), which has changed over time.

Perhaps like winning the lottery and getting robbed immediately after every time?

Thinking about it, the only system that could face these conditions would likely to be a fairly simple (single-celled) organism with a small genome (close to the minimum viable set of genes) with very small intergenic regions, perhaps growing under nucleic acid limiting conditions (e.g. low phosphate conditions) in conjunction with other conditions to which the genome is exquisitely tuned to. But again, setting that up artificially would be quite a task. Also considering that there are also mutations that are biochemically neutral (redundant codons) or functionally neutral (e.g. certain regions within proteins) I really doubt that such a condition even exists even in principle. Extrapolating that to a complex organism would be even more problematic.

Brown people. It means brown people.

To elaborate what I mentioned above, in order for that to happen the selective sweep must be so strong (or mutation rate so low) that any mutations would have to be strongly selected against. Especially as most mutations will be neutral this is highly unlikely in principle, which makes it very unlikely to exist in practice.

What I wanted to add in an edit but will put in here now is that there are different concepts of living fossils. Coelacanths are interesting , as Latimeria species were considered a paradigm of a living fossil for quite some time. With these species a hypothesis of a kind of genetic stasis had been formed, which is in contradiction to the tree-based paradigm I mentioned above. However, a closer view on the molecular level of these species have refuted or at least not supported these claims. I vaguely remember a paper where they (I believe) demonstrated that populations of a Latimeria had low molecular diversity and substitution rates but I also remember that that fell apart in meta-analyses. These are are examples for stabilizing selection and/or low/no mutations as well as no drift. The issue is that there are no good examples where these factors are so strong as to stabilize genomes for a long time frame. Even in artificial systems it is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to reproduce and even the most stable ecological niches to face some kind of fluctuations eventually.

There are very different themes within this topic. When folks refer to an organism being unchanged they refer to their morphology as Ten Oz mentioned, due to the reliance on fossil records. The underlying DNA changes are virtually unknown. We can recreate ancestral history using DNA of extant (i.e. still living) organisms, but they rely on measuring the differences between investigated species and assume that larger distances correlate with an earlier split. It would therefore also assume that a the distance for a given species would be much larger to its ancestor a few million years ago (even with little obvious morphological changes) compared to a different, extant species, who may look different, but had a shared ancestor only a few thousand years ago.

You see the marker to be a bit wavy? Usually that happens when the comb is not pulled out smoothly, creating a jagged edge (can also caused by incomplete polymerization).

IIRC, depending on the precise excitation wavelength the emission of DNA-EtBr is ~600. However, if I were to say anything, I would mention that the pocket for the marker seemed to be damaged and could benefit from a longer run time. :p

I think there is a bit of a disconnect between upper college level and first-year/high school knowledge. The issue is that we got tons of interactions mapped but have not built a simple narrative out of it yet, that can be easily conveyed to students. In addition, fluorescence live imaging and similar techniques have been around for a very long time, but since they are tricky (and often expensive) courses usually only provide hands-on in upper level courses (and sometimes only at the graduate level). Of course, there have been technical improvements (such as new variants of superresolution microscopy), but I think the barrier between textbook and research is less a technical one, but rather the difficulty to create large narratives if bits and pieces are not resolved yet. I.e. we know there are plenty of interactions and various paper have found either some of the mechanisms or figured out that certain disruptions could lead to physiological defects. However, unifying and synthesizing the data is still a bit on the tricky side. If someone intends to re-write a new textbook, it is would be either one of the hideous review-style books, which are not helpful to students (and only sometimes helpful for researchers) or it would be simplified to such a degree that it would not really add anything, except to state that there is more to it. This is not to be a criticism of teachers (regardless of level), of course. Considering the pace of biological sciences almost all college courses are out of date to various degrees. Unless one intends to build lectures entirely from recent lit (which is basically impossible for the fundamental courses) one have to rely on imperfect narratives and then "rebuild" the student's knowledge for certain elements, once they become relevant. What I do not like that much is the title of these reports, which like to pretend that every incremental improvement of our knowledge is the reveal of some big secret that no one was aware of. These, of course, are just another form of narrative, but I do not think that this is an appropriate description of the actual research progress.

The problematic issue with that statement is that it does not explain anything but, for some folks at least, carries certain connotations (i.e. that something is endemic or internal to a given group). It is only slightly accurate if one also include external factors, of which poverty and overpolicing were already mentioned. Unfortunately, that is often not considered when using the term "culture".

While that is true, at the same time, it changes the overtone. While a lot of folks deny climate change and evolution, the discussion has quite shifted from 20 years ago. And I think that is a good thing. Even if things do not happen fast (or even at all), it is not a good reason not to start.

You are making the same argument that I mentioned. Yes, the situation is complicated. However, we are not even starting to look at a possible scope and you already seem to have the need to re-frame the issue. What does the situation in Africa (which to quite some extent are also due to the actions of colonialism) has to do with folks that have to do with African-American citizens having been repressed and disenfranchised for generations? Why would that realistically be the scope of the inquiry? Unless, of course (I don't think you do) you want to make the claim that because they ended up in a wealthy industrialized nation they should consider themselves relatively lucky, and compare their luck to Africans then to their other fellow Americans... The case that is being made is that attempts for official inquiries even looking for the possibility of reparations, or at least a general, official acknowledgement of the situation whilst coming up with potential solutions has been consistently shot down.

I like to add two things. First, reparations are largely disliked in the population, that is a given. Quite a few arguments against it are that it is complicated (which is true). However, I disagree with the notion that because of that, the issue should not be touched at all. Rather, the case is that there should be an investigation to study e.g. effects and legacy of slavery and try to figure out which and whether there are processes to remedy them. While there are bits and pieces of historic studies, there has (to my knowledge) no official and comprehensive report from a commission that outlines or even acknowledges these issues in a comprehensive way. HR40 was such an attempt that has been introduced since the 90s. Similar aspects could conceivably also be attempted to resolve the status with indigenous people, though the issue is seemingly even more complicated. Nonetheless, I do not think that ignoring the issue is the right way forward, either. Traditionally, the only measures conducted were imperfect band aids (such as affirmative action measures). Yet, because of the lack of a general population in the populace these are seen as undeserved handouts and are therefore seen critically and are vulnerable to dismantlement by the government (as it is the case right now).

I think the easiest way is to describe dossier as a simple smear job with no foundation in facts and weaponize its existence and wither not referring to details or just repeat the mantra that it is fact free. As long as there is not deeper analysis in the Muller report (or if it those details are not released) it is easy to refer to the Barr summary to discredit it wholesale. After all, the lines are drawn and those that go with it, most likely will not be bothered by details or context.

I do not think that it is about the content of the dossier. Rather, it is about how it was handled. There is a conspiracy theory around that the dossier triggered scrutiny of the Trump campaign and a FISA warrant against Carter Page. The actual chain of events were quite a bit different but folks have tried their hardest to build it as a powerful narrative in order to tie the Clinton campaign into every investigation against Trump and his campaign. Thereby they can claim that it is not only a hoax, but an actual attack against the administration in a huge anti-Trump conspiracy. Folks love these stories. Too bad that this is actually not (just) on TV.

Oh, don't you worry. Graham has announced that they now want to investigate the FBI and the Clinton campaign and the Steele dossier. The latter is a bit funny as apparently McCain delivered the dossier to the FBI after advise from Graham. Graham has also argued for another special counsel to this end, so the drama is far from over (even before the report has been fully viewed by folks). I think we are stuck in a perpetual re-run of 2016.