CharonY

Well, France is one of the few countries that has established state secularity (laïcité). While other countries do have sort of separation (often to protect religious freedom) in France there seems to be the notion that religion should be kept out of the public sphere (which could limit certain religious aspects). But no infringements are allowed on the private level. Due to France's history in this regard, I guess it is not terribly surprising that atheism is high and that many see morals as a concept that is distinct from religion. In many European countries religion still has significant, if sometimes subtle, influence.

Aside from the obvious (i.e. as part of general homeostasis to maintain cellular and organelle function).

It really depends on the contamination, although I will agree that the most common ones are from the experimentator and many grow rather fast. However, you mentioned you are using malt broth. If memory serves the pH is usually low, somewhere around 5.5. This an intentional measure to limit bacterial growth and many, including fast-growers such as Escherichia grow very slowly under these conditions assuming temps of 20C or higher. So it is quite reasonably to expect only modest bacterial growth under these conditions, of you do not have acidophilic contamination. Likewise temperature could also be an issue, if you incubate them around RT. But again, it depends with what you have contaminated the cultures.

Actually the differences is looking at interactions between cultural groups and (non-human) animals and the other is just general human-animal interactions.

Not a mod, but we discourage simply providing answers to homework as it does not help understanding the subject. Rather we expect to see some thoughts towards answering them and someone is usually wiling to guide a long the way.

Depends on the medium, the type of contamination and whether the fungus does something to the bacteria. Sometimes contamination are yeasts or other fungi (if they look like large cells) and there may be competition going etc.

A while back I read that Mochizuki may have solved the abc conjecture but apparently the proof was so complicated that it was challenging for mathematicians to actually understand it. It is probably a bit of a long shot, but has anyone heard more about it from a professional side (i.e. from the actual community rather than blogs)? As a whole I found the whole issue quite an interesting in context of both, cutting edge science and science communication.

Bacteria only turn the broth cloudy if there is a lot of them. Low-level contaminations are much harder to spot. A microscope with good optics could find bacteria at 400x, but it is easier if you stain them.

Depending on how large it needs to be and how many helmets you need to store at the same time, using smaller, sealable boxes with a large amount of desiccants could be more effective. As swansont, said, sealing is only part of the problem, you still need to get the moisture out, first. And every time you open it, you get moisture in again. So if you have several helmets ready at the same time, a large box, such as a fridge with a good volume of silica gel (you can get them in large packs) could work. But if you have them ready one after the other, it may be worthwhile to store them individually in a smaller (helmet-sized) dry box. Also, using silica gel with moisture indicator helps a bit as you can see when the silica has absorbrd too much water. A step up would be to include a humidity sensor to see of your enclosure is dry enough.

I think in Australia disability support is given if the person is unable to work more than 15h/week, so it is not only given for complete disability. However depending on the details of the Disability Act it may make them less attractive as employees as it may be harder to fire them. Looking at data it does seem that disability recipients have increased, the biggest increase in the 90s. The largest group (and that is similar to most other countries) is psychological (~30% of all recipients in 2013), followed by Musculo-Seletal&Connective tissue (such as back-related issues) with about 27%. Looking the raw numbers it does seem that Australia has an extremely high number on some sort of disability support. However, one has to take into account a) the size of the work force and b) the age demographics, as the disability rate increases substantially with age. So, looking at the percentage of the workforce on disability support we see that in 2013 it is at~4.4%, going back a decade it was 4.3% in 2003. To see a substantial difference one would have to go another decade back with 1993 having a rate of ~3%. So here the growth does not seem to as large as when we look at the recipient number alone. I would also assume that between the 90s and 2000 there may have some changes in disability eligibility rules. Nonetheless the numbers do not seem to be absurd if one takes aging into account, but I would have to dig more statistics up for that (data are from the Australian Government Department of Social Services).

Do you have protocol? If so concentrations should always be indicated by weight and/or volume (e.g. w/w, v/w, v/v). Of course in case of solids weight is usually used.

Precisely. The inverse question is typically more meaningful. I.e. what hosts a virus has.

I assume that your are an undergrad? The important bit is that you won't be joining an institution, you will, hopefully, join a group. I would identify the precise type of research you are interested in and find a group that does this kind of work. Stem cell research itself is incredibly broad and groups tackle the biology from all kind of perspectives. The easiest is probably look at the techniques they use, as you can acquire transferable skills if you learn them. Note that the group also has to have the capacity to take you in, so do not make inquiries too late.

The issue is that all of it (and it really depends on what you call a "bot" there are a lot of misconceptions here) are at best proof-of-concept level things. We can synthesize lots of particles and couple them to each other or load them with drugs. But little survives the first stages of validation. Of course we have to play around until we find something that works, but there is a huge and under appreciated gap between the concepts and clinical utility. A handful of nanomedicines are in or have passed initial trials, but from a technical viewpoint it is not fundamentally different than using traditional drug development. Note that some were developed as early as the 90s (Doxil). As such, these developments are part of long research and development pipelines and while hypes exist we are not yet at a point where we have tools to fundamentally revolutionize medicine. Technically,I think that we may be getting closer on the diagnostic side (as part of what is called "personalized" or "precision mediicine"). Treatments are still far more complicated, especially as in most cases we rely on the body to heal itself.

The answer is skirting around the mechanism but is not quite complete. Obviously just dissipating the proton gradient in itself does not generate more heat, as long as there is not difference in the chain itself. The reason being that the ETC is physiologically uncoupled from the ATP synthesis step to begin with. The key is that the cells enters a futile cycle and the consequences it brings (i.e. think in terms of stochiometric coupling of mitochondrial energy metabolism, if that helps).

Actually, I think the lack of testability with regard to evolution is one of the most common problem with this area. Often, compelling narratives are provided but the link to evolution itself typically cannot be tested. This makes the whole evolution part seem to be just garnish without much substance. This is not universally the case, of course, but it seemed to me that the field has quite a number of fluff pieces, but are hyped due to the compelling stories they tell. I guess the major issue is the imbalance about how big and attractive their story is, relative to the data they have or provide.

1) Fact: humans are not necessary to maintain viable ecosystems on Earth. 2) Fact: humans have destroyed or damaged numerous ecosystems 3) Verdict: ?

But who do you blame if this does not result in a sudden utopia?

I was thinking more about individual development of mate choice and imprinting rather than the sexual selection element. Though that is quite an interesting topic itself. I do not know Geoffrey Miller, although I have become slightly skeptical on the area of evolutionary psychology.

The basic question may as well be how and when are sexual preferences formed. Which leads to lots of literature but no simple models or answers. Considering the regional and historic variations of ideals obviously hard-wired biological explanations is unlikely to yield a useful answer. Rather, it is likely that preferences may have their origins in childhood exposure. I am not sure about the literature in this area, though (in humans at least).

Uh, that is incorrect. Decomposition can happen in the absence of oxygen (quite a bit of it actually) although it is typically slower than oxic degradation. Temperature is only so far relevant that it is not too low for biochemical reaction. Well, water is correct insofar as all living processes require water to some degree. The question in OP cannot be answered, however, as it simply does not describe sufficient parameters. What type of substances? How much? What system are we talking about?

No, since you cannot grow wings by wishing it, you can eliminate consciousness or wishful thinking from the discussion as well. I have also no idea why you add mental power, as you will note that many insects are quite able flyers. Also note that I mentioned active flight. There are reports of others, including cephalopods to use jet propulsion to glide out of water. You can discuss things better if you either focus more on the topic and leave out baseless/wild speculation, or at least separate that part out to indicate that you are wildly speculating. For example you are speculating about mollusks (for some reasons, it was meant to illustrate a completely different point, but alright). But the next paragraph gets completely off the rails with unfounded statements presented as fact: Why? And why only for them and not for other flying animals? Uhm. No. At least not the way you presented it. To be fair, I am not sure what point you tried to make, though.

The free will part is unnecessary (and obfuscating to a degree), and it does not need necessarily the actions of animals, as the abiotic factors are complex enough. But if we take out all the elements of free will that you put in, the general argument stands. It only appears to be directed after the fact, as you can potentially trace back the major streams and create a plausible hypothesis how it arrived there. But starting from the point of origin there are too many degrees of freedom to predict some inevitability. Some things could have happened but didn't due to some major events, other may have happened only because of them. Likewise, the small steps can probably be modeled to a degree, i.e. small scale changes in the gene pool (or in the analogy, likely travel routes in the next few minutes/hours) but once we reach a certain level of complexity things become close to impossible to predict. In the background of that complexity it makes little sense to me assume a direction. The latter would require some level of predictability. For example, why do we have actively flying arthropods, but not, e.g. molluscs? What made it inevitable for one group, but not the other? Why do insects fly, but not other arthropods? Why do most birds fly, but only the bats among the mammals? Similar to throwing a ball into the ocean, looking back from the end point it may appear obvious, but if you if you look at the whole journey, you will realize it is far from that.

I disagree. Bodily parts are typically used in the context of larger organisms. Physiology is a general term used to describe biological functions at various scales with a focus on the underlying mechanisms. The study of cell or microbial physiology (which technically do not have bodies in the common sense of the word) refers to other elements than plant or animal physiology, for example. Similarly, the function of an organ could be described in the context of body parts, whereas metabolic pathways, which are crucial elements of cellular physiology would not be. So to summarize, I would characterize physiology as the study of the mechanism of biological functions, or how elements work together to perform biological functions. What they are, specifically, depends on the scale you are looking at. Edit: because some recent posts typo-shamed me.

Also context. Posting on a forum where people may or may not read your post has different requirements than e.g. job applications where you not only want the receiver to read it, but to use it to create an opinion of you.