CharonY

I think you are thinking about a "Brave New World", which luckily is fiction. However, the part that people are seriously thinking about is to look for potential diseases and risk factors and ways to mitigate them.

The mechanism is not that it will get used to drugs, but instead there may already bee some that are resistant and if all others are killed off, they are the only ones that survive and spread. However, this basically applies to bacteria as antibiotics do not work on viruses. Also with regard to antibiotics it should be noted that the majority of antibiotics re used in agriculture with an estimated 63,200 tons in 2010 (which will have increased by now).

While it is not possible to track individual migrations, the time scale appears to be tens of thousands of years. I.e. the dispersal happened in time scales much longer than our entire recorded history.

Also note that it is not that people packed up and just left. The migration should rather be seen as an expansion of territory utilized by humans.

Under oxic conditions ascorbate (vitamin C) is oxidized to 2,3-dioxo-L-gulonate. That can be further degraded to D-xylulose 5-phosphate (uncer anoxic conditions the pathway is slightly altered but ends with the same product). The best studied bacteria known to utilize ascorbate include Escherichia and Klebsiella.

The link is not the original trial but rather a review of evidence (and the link also only shows the abstract, the study being discussed is Josling 2001). The authors found only one study that provided evidence. The author affiliation is a bit suspect as it seems to belong to consulting company which may take the validity of the results in question. The study is based on supplements (i.e. not natural consumption of garlic in the diet) and has only a very low number of participants. This is especially problematic as the outcome is relatively unspecific and hence, difficult to control. As a comparison, actual medications require specific monitoring of benchmarks. Whereas in this case it is based on self-reporting (days the participants felt challenged, for example). As it is supposed to be randomized individual bias should be minimized, yet it is is difficult to properly assess efficacy as in clinical studies. In addition the scoring of symptoms appears to be slanted which may or may not be an attempt to increase significance after data collection. In either case, it is possible that garlic supplements help with cold one way or another (as may e.g. a balanced diet). For example, it is not reported whether the participant's regular diet contains garlic or whether the groups were balanced for risk factors. Note that the study does actually not indicate whether regular of doses of garlic that may be found in some diets actually have an effect. The capsules in question contains allicin, which is formed in garlic by an enzyme from alliin. Unfortunately allicin is rather unstable in garlic so that the actual content per weight garlic is relatively low. One whole garlic contains ~ 10 mg of alliin. A capule can be anywere between 90-360 mg. Thus even if we assume no loss due to conversion to allicin to have the same effect you would need to consume 9-36 garlic bulbs a day. Other than that, ascribing one's health status to a singular component is never going to be correct and it should be note that there is no pharmaceutical treatment of the common cold. Only means to alleviate symptoms.

That depends a lot on your application. I doubt that it is the case for OP but if you need quantitative reproducibility or are investigating high-resolution interactions with surfactants you better be more precise. If you want to work at the critical micelle concentration, for example being even 1mmol off can be problematic, depending on your analysis.

Well, I kind of disagree with this characterization. It is true that many breakthroughs are done with government funds. Typically, researchers have to make these findings publicly available (this is the case for NIH and NSF grants, for example). However, there is a difference in finding a mechanism/compound with medical application and developing something that has commercial/clinical use. This is why the institutions and the researchers maintain the right to the intellectual property. To commercialize a drug for example, is usually not something that can be easily done within a research group. Instead money has to be raised, which can include federal funding specifically for this purpose (e.g. SBIR/STTR programs) as well as private investors. Whether the resulting product can be offered at a low price is up to the board of the resulting start-up as well as the economic environment. However, the company would also take the risk if it does not work out. Obviously, if they set the goal to have a low-profit margin drug, there would be few investors interested in it, although there have been (few) examples where something like that worked out.

Typically you get a HCl salt. In unbuffered water it will be acidic. If you have a different salt you may titrate it with an acid.

Now you are just making fun of me. What else can you be other than caffeinated (I believe "heavily caffeinated" is a tautology, no)?

.... is there any other way to post?

As noted we know far to little about (human) biology to be able to decide what is the best. Even for seemingly small things we are unsure about the outcome. E.g. early exposure to peanuts have been shown to increase or decrease likelihood of peanut allergy, depending on study. And on top, things interact with each other. Seemingly "good" things may in some circumstances be bad. Bottom line is we are adapted to survive under suboptimal conditions. We may actually not do well under seemingly optimal ones. Also, it is difficult to determine an optimal outcome. Assume, for example that there is a way to increase longevity, but it is associated with higher risk of depression. What would be optimized? Or would one look for a sweet spot to balance the two risks against each other?

Uh, OP was about something else entirely. I am not entirely sure whether it is a properly hijack, as it still kind of revolves around swansong. But then, what doesn't?

Yeah, good thing that there is only a moderate increase in female avatars. I am almost out of upvotes.

I do not think that the colour does much, except giving it a more contrasty look. That, however is typically not necessarily associated with what is probably meant by sirenesque. Rather, it is used to create a contrasty, dramatic look, which accentuates the lighting. While the light itself is soft (note that the only shadows trace her cheekbones and jawline), but very directional (with at least an additional light to highlight the hair). That is rather typical of classic dramatic Hollywood shots. What makes the image appealing, or sirenesque, however, is the pose and use of hair. Not only is the face framed by it, but it also conceals an eye. That directs the viewer almost immediately to the other eye, which directs to a point outside of the frame. So the viewer is almost directed to an unknown event outside of what can actually be seen. That lends a bit of mystery to the picture, which is supported by the almost hidden statue of a panther. The prop actually also further accentuates the jawline but, together with her hair, hides almost everything besides her face. Other than that a black and white pic does not really add that much to it, although it can hide some quality issues of the pic and does not suffer from bad white balance, obviously.

I would say that Connery is slightly more interesting as he has an odd kind of charm to his lunacy, whereas Craig just seems the usual kind of violent psychopath. In that context I should add that I think a good character does not have to be appealing or likable on a personal level. In fact, sometimes quite the opposite works better.

Actually I think that for a number of reasons the shearing due to freeze-thaw itself is only a secondary concern, but rather minute impurities tend to do the damage during the warm-up phase. In practical terms, there is not difference, of course. For extremely long storage (years to decade) I found DNA to be quite stable (at least whole bacterial chromosomes as well as plasmids) as precipitated under ethanol at -80C or carefully freeze dried. I presume that this is not the scope being asked, though.

What do you mean by the weight and volumes are not critical? Or do you mean that the difference for water between weight and volume percentages is not critical?

Wow, Arête must be gorgeous.

So according to your logic a female expert would have much more upvotes than a male one? Also have you looked at experts with less than 2k posts?

What is "OSF"? Also, did you just calculate the ratio of rep points to total posts? If so, very prolific posters are likely to have a less favorable ratio over time as upvotes tend to be rather stochastic in many cases. As you noted, among resident experts the spread can be enormous. There is one poster here with less than 1k posts but usually writes rather well (though I may disagree with the content). The username sounds male and he has got a ratio of ~31%. So your rant seems to be a major concern in the +-3% spread (why didn't you single out that particular individual, the ratio is still higher than most experts/mods?). If you are not only obsessed about rep but about rep ratio, the best way is to post little, but make them quality post. I certainly do not heed that advice and am sure that my ratio is much lower than other experts/mods here. But if I cared about it, it would mean that I actually concern myself with internet points...

Note that this is specific of Mycoplasma. For example, there have been curing experiments in other bacteria, but usually it was so time-consuming that people did not go all the way (after all funding was limited for that exercise, as referees tend to view it as fishing experiments). There have been other approaches to look at the essential set of genes, including wide comparisons of many prokaryotic genomes. The consensus seems that there is no such universal set and that it is highly dependent on the cell. I.e. chances are that using that minimal genome into a E. coli cell it won't work. So the ability to extrapolate these findings could be somewhat limited. The origin of this work can be seen in the systematic analysis of essential genes (examples in yeast include work from Goebl and Petes in the 80s) and has then focused on genomic analyses of reduced genomes of parasites (Buchnera being another porminent example). A general issue is of course the environment, as a minimum genome requires an intra- and extracellular context to be viable.

To even scratch any of these questions would require very, very long responses. But a few things I'd like to add: the (modern) immigrant experience in the US and Canada is quite different from Europe and as a result the muslim community has quite different structure in many metrics (including affluence). To the broader question to links to terrorism, it is because islamic terrorist group exist (though other lengthy research would be required to explain why it exist). Ultimately they represent an attractive outlet for their misgivings (probably with goals between extreme vagues ones such as as RAF and NSU and those with more specific goals such as ETA and IRA).

I do not quite follow what you say here. The point with regard to the vaccine is that it is possible that the persons may have gotten the reaction from sources other than the vaccine. In cases of measles-related deaths the frequency is so high (up to 4 per thousand in case of adults >30) that it is much more certain that the deaths are caused by measles (or rather, complications due to measles). I tried to find more data on how often allergic reactions to vaccines occur. However, the only actual data set was from 1990 in which in the USA a total 70 million doses were used and in 11 cases anaphylactic reactions were recorded (I have not found any data on deaths). I.e. assuming that there are no changes in the formulation we are looking at about one case per 6.4 million vaccinated. And this is only assuming that there was a link between the vaccination and the allergic reaction (mostly those with egg allergies). In comparison, before the introduction of vaccination 450 deaths were associated with measles every year. Moreover, in the late 50s every year about 150k patients had respiratory complications and 4000 had cases of encephalitis (each year). As it already has been mentioned, the severity of complications are often worse resulting in close to 50k hospitalizations due to measles each year. So even if the frequency was not high the actual number of severe complications are much higher than vaccine-related issues. As others have noted, protection exists even below 100% vaccination rates. It should also be noted that in these modern times, outbreak have the potential to spread faster and in a larger area than they used to.

High DNA concentrations also scavenge Mg2+ ions and make them unavailable for the polymerase. In addition, the extract could contain inhibiting factors.