CharonY

Is your question whether CO2 influences pH of HEPES? If so, why would you expect it in the first place?

Here is the part that I am skeptical about. I have little doubt that the young ones realize that e.g. gender stereotyping is a bad thing. I am just not certain whether they are aware of what it entails and miss that behaviour as they assume it does not exist anymore. I.e. complacency has set in and you can hear quite often that people claim that things like racism, sexism etc. are non-issues as they do not consider themselves sexist/stereotyping/racist etc (after all, what we really have achieved as a first step is to associate these terms with a negative perception, which does not mean that the perception itself is eradicated). Hence, so goes the reasoning, it must have stopped existing. For example, just because gay marriage is now legal, it does not mean that discrimination has vanished. While there is significant improvement, much is being shifted from the over to the subtle. And the latter is often not considered an issue by perpetrators. There have been a number of surveys among millenials (including e.g. biology students) and sadly, it appears that the trend is actually reversing when it comes to gender equality. I will have to dig those out, but students systematically overestimate the ability of their male peers and in other studies millenials were also less open to female leaders. Now, one could argue that it is still an improvement. But the sad thing is that in direct comparison, the males in the younger group (below 29 years or so) were more likely to have this views compared to males in the 30-44 year group and above 45 were even less likely. The same trend was also observed in females, where the youngest group was more likely to agree with an increased role of women in the household (instead of an career) than the older age brackets. What really appears to happen is that the older ones, that have seen the massive shift in attitude seem, on average more willing to change their attitude. This observations fits well with what I have observed in academia, but is also in agreement with the study on physics teachers, I mentioned earlier. So one possible explanation is that one actually needs experience to recognize these attitudes, which means we may have to wait until the young generation gets older to see another shift. As usual, things are complicated.

With regards to online harassment, I once had a gender-ambiguous name while entering rather large-ish IRC channel that was RPG-(and strangely, engineering-oriented). Holy hell, I did not know that you could have so many PM windows open at once. One thing I noticed is that some people get defensive when gender bias gets mentioned. In that regard I would like to re-iterate that issues generally exist on a systemic level and often (due to the system) members of both genders participate in stereotyping (regardless of the gender of the subject). In that regard String is correct that it may take a long while until things really change. At the same time, I wonder about that, considering that stereotyping is typically the easy thing to do. Working against assumption requires conscious work and especially going against subconscious bias requires a significant amount of introspection, often with no clear answers. After all, there is generally no true objective way to fully evaluate a person and their qualities. As such I feel the best one could hope for is to catch as many instances of those in oneself and at least be a little bit self-critical to minimize the impacts of such behaviour.

One could also add that the donor may be infected. From what I understand e.g. toxoplasmosis is a significant issue.

As I mentioned, I am not sure how much relative impact harassment may have. However, it is possible that experiences discourage women to go into areas that are male-dominated to begin with. Also, can you show me where men in physics are more polite and supportive? If you mean the 31% STEM statistic it just means that even in STEM harassment is observed. Even if the rate is lower than hospitality, would you not agree that it may be prevent at least some women to enter a stressful, highly competitive career? One would need to e.g. see whether there are differences in the rates between disciplines to make any assumptions in that regard. However, as hyper pointed out, I will also note the strong dependency of grads and postdocs on their advisor, which (IMO) creates an unhealthy power imbalance, specifically in STEM. Overall, however, I do think that it is more a contributing factor later down the pipeline rather than at the beginning (though I may be wrong, I just have not seen data to substantiate either claim). There are other important factors at play. For example, there was a paper in which the author sent out physics assignments to Physics teacher at various European schools to have them graded. The assignment was a slightly open-ended question to allow for leeway in evaluation. The interesting result was that if the same assignment had a female name as student, it was graded significantly worse than if it had a male name. Interestingly the trend was also there when the teacher was female. Another interesting thing is that the bias is larger for younger teacher, but is gone for older, more experienced ones (which meshes well with my personal observations). So there are two things here. One is the apparent gender bias in evaluating a person and second, the fact that the younger teachers (who, according to this board are less sexist) show the highest bias. I would assume that the bias would also be there when the teachers were students which could colour the interaction already early on. One interesting bit was also that German male teachers did not seem to have that tendency, they just gave everyone low marks. While it may seem encouraging, it may imply that when we start evaluating things at the top (e.g. prestigious positions), the difference may become skewed again.

I am pretty sure that somewhere, someone is training monkeys to write assignments, though.

No worries, pedantry is fine (though probably going off-topic, but then it is my fault by starting that). My number was based on the memory of a molecular clock paper, but upon revisiting the high end estimate was actually ~35 MYA. However, I think you may misunderstood the article, though (you'll have to read the actual paper, the report is a bit on the incoherent side). It was not assumed that divergence happened 20 MYA, but people were unable to find catarrhine fossils older than that (and note, not finding a suspected fossil is no evidence of its absence in itself). As I mentioned, this does not fit what has been estimated using molecular data. As the fossils were found in a 25 MYA stratum and exhibited the traits of old world monkey and apes, respectively, it means that the split must have happened before that, putting the paleontological evidence closer to molecular estimates. One would need to find fossils roughly 10 MYA further back to have actually a fossil record of the split. If you are really interested in these topics I encourage you to read the original papers, as most of these short articles really do a rather bad job to contextualize what the researchers have found.

Quite possibly, but since it was used in the context of evolution I had a hard time not making a quip about it. Though to be honest, in hindsight I have no idea why I thought that it was amusing in my head. I blame it on the bachelor theses that I have to grade. But looking at the other thread (and considering that it was in the maths section), the hijack is pretty obvious.

I meant monkey-ape split. I thought it was clear, as humans never split from great apes (i.e. we are and will forever be Hominidae). I do realize that I only said "The split" which may have left ambiguity. The split between the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans was 6 MYA ago, if that is what you meant.

Humans are apes, not monkeys. The split was over 40 million years ago. More importantly the question was a purely mathematical in monkey could be replaced by any random walk letter generator. You, however decided to start a breeding program.

Ultimately a big issue is that it is one of the cases where there are lots of confounding variables, making it very difficult to even clearly formulate the issue, much less a solution. So far, various hypotheses (including e.g. stereotype threat) were unable to deliver clear results why things are as they are. The goal is not necessarily to have gender equivalence in all categories, but the fact that imbalances exist and we do not know why (just stating difference in interest is not helpful as it still does not explain the mechanism) is vexing from an intellectual standpoint alone. But if we only focus on academic achievements and completely ignore career challenges for women at this point, there is another aspect that is interesting. In many countries there is gender parity in Chemistry, often more women then men in Biology but far less in Physics, Mathematics and Engineering. Interestingly this gradient seems to be true for many countries. E.g. in the UK biology is dominated by women, there is parity in chemistry and in physics it drops to about 25%. In Germany there is about parity in biology, about 40% women in Chemistry and 10% in physics. Attention has been drawn to mathematics as a potential divider, though it would not quite explain the difference in biology and chemistry. It is also interesting that engineering often has fewer than physics, despite the latter is probably more maths-heavy. It is possible that in the end it is much about perception and how we teach and it may take a few more generation to change that.

I would argue (and maybe someone else has argued that already, if so, my apologies, I was dizzy from all those rapdily moving goalposts) that in science discipline-specific lingo arises due to the desire to communicate effectively and to avoid confusion. Though for those not familiar with the literature it may seem confusing. The basis of this is probably the same in every area of specialization, including outside science. Just go to a hardware shop and ask for the thingy that does fasten the other thingy. Nope, a bit larger. How is it called again? Most take cues from context, obviously.

I think that harassment may be a contributing factor, but especially in competitive areas it may not be the largest. There are a few things that I find interesting. For example, the assertion that this generation is not as sexist as all the previous, and then describe a typical old-fashioned traditional gender role with women cleaning the house and men working in factories. Not realizing that these stereotypes at least contribute to pigeonhole people is fascinating. Another example is that being exceptionally pretty (whatever that means) somehow contributes to harassment. If that is the case, we clearly have an issue. Also it is important to note that we have a (disporportionate) loss of women in the higher tiers of academia in most areas. In biology, for example, a bit more than 50% of graduates are women, but only ~18% of full profs are. I.e. in addition to entry issues, which for some reasons are not as apparent in biology as in physics (which, in my mind boils down to perception rather than any realities of the sciences) but the more competitive it gets, the harder it is for women to succeed over men. The reason here is that due to the competitiveness any slight negative aspect (real or perceived) over their peers can be career killing. Anecdotally, I found that even here, the perception that only the older guys are more sexist not to be accurate. The ones that let disparaging comments slip over a beer or two tend to be in the late 30s-50s segment. Those that are older are often surprisingly positive about that matter. Interestingly, those also tend to have a traditional family set up. I.e. they being in an academic career, whereas the women caters for all their outside-research needs (including raising children). One argument being brought up is that since women also have to do that, they simply cannot be as productive as their male counterparts. It remains to be seen whether the next generation is going to be better in that regard. A basic issue, it seems, is the assumption that if one does not encounter issues, these must not exist. However since a number of the arguments on this board start with outright denial, I do have my doubts. Also some of the link provided here somehow as an argument that issue does not exist are actually do not support their assertions. For example, there are industries dominated by women, but most of these jobs are not well paid (adding to the statistic that women earn less, even if they have a job). Even worse, for example male nurses tend to earn more than female nurses. Now the reason may not be outright sexism, but contributing factors could be the traditional view of female roles in households. The fact that even women adhere to them do not make the situation less problematic in effect (again, as it contributes to lower earning power). I have also no clue why suicide rates are an evidence for anything. There are so many contributing factors to unpack here, deriving a definite statement is just foolish. On top I will just add that the rate of suicide attempts of women is ~4 times higher in the US than in men, and much of that difference is due to the fact that there is a gender difference in method. Men typically choose more violent and effective methods (e.g. guns) whereas women prefer poisoning and use of pills (and as discussed in another thread here, the latter can often be unsuccessful). There are a couple of things that I found interesting when looking at student achievements (rather than careers). It appears that in most countries on the high school level girls tend to outperform boys. In boys, data from USA and Canada suggest that chosing a STEM career is correlated with their PISA score in mathematics. In girls this does not seem to be the case and even high scorers are less likely to choose STEM than low scoring boys. Another aspect that I found intriguing but for which I do not have seen much data, is whether the way we teach (i.e. the tutoring style) has an influence on performance and enjoyment of the topic. I only know anecdotes from colleagues but there was a course held by different instructors and one had a enjoyable part with lots of "nerd-humour" which was well liked by most of the male-dominated class. However, this part also showed the lowest score for the females in class. I did not think much about it, until another colleague, who constructed an online class and who had a similar sense of humour noted that in his module females were also abnormally low. Again, this are only anecdotes but I wonder what the overall impact is. Note that having a female teacher itself does not necessarily have an influence as the teaching styles may be similar, overall.

I think it would matter when you measure mass and what the efficiency of the processes involved are. Immediately after excitation (and ignoring that there are several capturing events) one would assume a mass increase of the photosystem as outlined by others above. However, that energy is used to e.g. split water and initiate electron transfer and excess energy is lost as heat and/or fluorescence (i.e. radiation). So measuring the total mass of the system later in the process should yield a different mass as one would expect from the initial absorbed energy alone.

Identifying how the system works is relevant in figuring out net gains and losses. For example one has to assume that quite a bit of energy would be lost at every step of the process. And that is precisely the importance of seeing the reactions as uncoupled. If the initial excitation was all that results in a fixed carbon, it would likely add to the mass. However, as it basically only excites the photosystem, which then utilizes that energy to initiates several transfer reactions (which are associated with a bit of energy loss along the gradient) it would probably add very little, if at all to the net mass of the system. But to be certain someone with more knowledge in that matter would have to take a look at that. Clearly the mass-energy equivalence is insufficient to fully explain the system.

Oh yes, the embargo was in many ways a means to strongarm Japan into negotiations. However, there were certain demands on both sides that were deal-breakers for the others. From what I remember Roosevelt himself (and part of his administration) were pushing for a retreat from China, which was unacceptable to the Japanese leadership (am not sure whether that was the biggest issue in itself, though). Likewise, the Japanese assumed that there was no compromise to be had and decided to set a deadline for an end of the negotiations.

I think the issue is less that of physics as a specific example, but the overall inclination of women to go into careers that are traditionally less well paid or getting stuck at lower levels of hierarchies. These are large contributors to the wage gap. Traditionally, it has been considered less of a problem as one assumed that the majority of the income will come from the husband. This configuration assumes a financial dependency of the woman but is not well suited to modern worklife anymore. The big issue now is that especially single-women are more likely to end in poverty than single men, for example (especially when raising children). So the next question would be whether it makes sense to foster more interest in topics that are likely to yield a better career. There is, of course the initial resistance in breaking into a field that is dominated by the other gender. Strangely, the opposite (i.e. men in female-dominated industries) seem to have less of an issue.

Well, the thing is at the end of the day we are all humans and unfortunately we cannot expect people, including scientists, to be able to transcend that. It works somewhat if it is only about science (though even then bias can be apparent) but it gets really iffy when it comes into situation where evaluations are made (e.g. job interviews).

Actually, the light reaction does not yield sugar. Rather, it uses the light energy to liberate electrons to move through an electron transport chain that powers a proton pump. That proton motive force is used to form ATP at a ATP synthetase. The ATP (as well as formed NADPH) are then used to fuel CO2 fixation in a totally independent chemical pathway (Calvin cycle).

One should note that it was not exclusively Japanese aggression in itself that lead to conflict with the US. One has to remember that Western powers at that time were heavily involved in carving out Asia for themselves and Japan was a threat to that. The initial attacks on China were pretty much ignored, though the threat level of Japan rose with entering the Tripartite Pact and a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union. It was then clear that Japan intended to expand into South-East Asia (after signing an agreement with Vichy France) allowing Japan to station units in Indochina. That, however, threatened US ambitions in that region (including the threat of a possible attack on the American Philipines). Together with the fact that it was known that Japan sought autarky (by means of seizing resources from East and Sout-East Asia) and had intention to drive out Western imperialist forces, it was in the end less a move to curb aggression in itself, but rather a move to maintain a sphere of influence and limiting that of an emerging power.

Is gene therapy actually a field with jobs? If so what jobs are they? I would assume that they would do pretty much the same as the dev for other therapeutics. Whether you fit any of the job descriptions depends on your degree and experience. I believe you have a BSc, so your role would likely be in a very similar role. A vertical transition would be far more desirable. However, in the current climate a bachelor (or master) tends to be limited to technical/analyst roles (in the R&D stream).

There are various reasons, but ultimately it was based on his personal decision. While individual motives are difficult to ascertain there is a host of books out there that have speculated about various aspects of it. As has been noted, the tripartite pact itself (von Ribbentrop reminded him of that) was not the reason as it was a defensive pact. Among the various reasons: - Germany and the US were already close to being at war due to the material supply the US provided as well as involvement of US citizens in the Spanish war as well as in China. It is speculated that Hitler wanted to pre-empt an eventual declaration by Roosevelt. - A show of strength as diversion from the stalling Soviet campaign and to fuel his sense of grandiosity - A deep lack of knowledge regarding the industrial and military potential of the US - A desire to take the offensive before the US military capacity could be increased to threaten the European theatre. Not quite, Japan had pan Asian ambitions and the US intended to limit their offensive abilities by enforcing embargoes. So for Japan to continue their military expansion, they needed that oil. As noted above, the attack on the US was a strategic decision by Japan. At that point in time Japan had a well-trained war machine underway and had ambitions to emerge as a superpower uniting East-Asia under their rule. Note what tiny Germany achieved to the then British superpower and the fact that at that time the US was not yet one.

I am not sure I agree with that statement. While Colussus predated ENIAC, both collaborated only later on the Pilot ACE.

So we are limiting the discussion here to knowledge transfer here (i.e. how much a child is taught). You describe a situation where there is a distribution of children with different amount of training. How does this explain the the proposed longitudinal change in training attainment?

How do yo define "smarter". Also, do you think your parents were taught nothing as children?