CharonY

Or more typically a vector construct containing a modified gene product.

As John noted, the title is bad. Sperm is not created, but rather genetic material is transferred from not fully differentiated cells. As such fatherhood is never in question (as in typical ivf).

Re Inuits: it is important to note that in Inuit the life expectancy is markedly lower than the rest of the population. E,g, in Nunavut, Canada the life expectancy of Inuit is at 67.7 for males and 72.8 for females. The averages for the total Canadian population is at 77.5 and 81.3, respectively. As cancer is typically highly correlated with age it is likely that this will skew statistics. However, a difference in diet seems to be correlated with different types of cancers. Saliva pH can change due to a lot of factors, including gingivitis and periodontitis. These, in turn can be correlated with other health issues. But even if pH is diagnostic for cancer (which, to my knowledge, is not as it has a ton of false positive detections) it only means that it could be a symptom. I.e. changing the pH does nothing to the underlying disease. For example if you force yourself to stop coughing pneumonia would not vanish. Finally one should add that companies rarely research in detail the biology of diseases. This is more fundamental research and is typically carried out in research institutions which are funded by public money. And those funding agencies are very interested in easy means to improve human health. Unfortunately, most of the time these things do not work well. On the positive side, as long as one does not neglect methods that have been shown to work, minor modification to diet are unlikely to do harm, either. It is only when one goes alternative without any foundation (with Steve Jobs being a famous example) that things do not turn out so well.

Assuming it is not just a hobby, I strongly suggest first to talk to your advisor about the experiments you are going to conduct. It is very important for them to assess which parts of a project you are comfortable doing and where they need to coach you or at least which reading material they should provide. Otherwise it is very tricky to figure out what went wrong until it is far too late.

I guess same reason why the subsections are oddly constructed. There is not enough dedicated traffic/posting to justify a re-organization.

In the link there was no indication that the crowdsourcing is any way affiliated with the Church lab.

This idea would have several issues. First is creating or finding an RNAse that is expressed in large amounts and does not otherwise interfere with cellular functions. That alone is pretty much kills the idea. Then, you would have that somehow inserted in all haematopoietic stem cells (the progenitor cells) in order to ensure that all T-cells carry that gene. That being said, there are attempts at gene therapy strategies which typically aim for the immune system to recognize compromised cells (such as infected, or cancer cells, for example). Other attempts which included trying to render cells resistant were less successful in animal models.

Looking at a recent PNAS article (Deaton and Case vol. 112 no. 49) at least in the middle-aged white male segment it appears that the highest issue (higher than suicide) is drug abuse (alcohol and drug poisoning). This effect was mostly observed in low income/education groups (highschool degree or less) whereas for the group with college education mortality was actually declining. Overall, especially opioid use are far higher in white males compared to other ethnic groups. Also IIRC more people were reporting chronic pains. Whereas these are somewhat related, I do not know.

That is weird. Cynicism usually works fairly well as isolator.

If you are talking about manual labour, in the USA, according to the BLS 17% work in service (including e.g. nurses, chefs, janitors, etc), 9% in maintenance and construction, 12% in production, to give some examples. There are more groups that I have not gone through, but even with those we are closer to 30% rather than 0.3%. While some of these jobs may or are already automated (which is the reason why production is so low), it would require quite a bit of tecnological advances to be able to replace that many jobs. Also, the replacement may not always be cost effective. As others, I fail to see how getting rid of the base would result in in any kind of benefit. After the inevitable collapse of the economic system (after all, people with lower income put most of their money into the economy) the few remaining rich (deserving is certainly not something I would put in) would be left with some rather uncomfortable toilet paper.

The smallest sensory unit is, depending on how you frame it, in each case either a single cell (i.e. the smallest unit to transfer signal to another cell and ultimately to the brain) or a protein that reacts to a stimulus (usually eliciting some kind of conformational change) that may or may not contribute to a signal on the cellular level. Usually this is done via the manipulation of ion channels (which are also proteins). So from that particular viewpoint there is virtually no differences between sensory organs on the detector level. As others have noted, a comparison only makes sense between identical stimuli. Each tone consists of a large amount pressure changes that the ear resolves into various frequencies and amplitudes to re-create a sound. The fact that you can distinguish instruments requires the sensing of thousands of queues at the same time. Likewise each smell is the result of thousands of chemicals acting on olfactory receptors. In some ways shape recognition is easier, and that is why we have an easier time processing it.

See, that is why you want one that is less sensitive for online purposes. I use an old anvil as a meter. It still broke though.

Likewise. And stay healthy, folks.

I thing both you and MigL have only a slightly different perspective of the same thing. Essentially the stability of a country is not determined by a small set of factors such as ethnicity or religion. Though they can be used as a cohesive or disruptive element. Whether they are, depends on a lot of other factors, including history (which will influence social dynamics) but also economy and others. Another reason why ethnicity and religion can be used disruptively is when they can be identified externally. It is much harder to identify and discriminate people if they appear the same. But as has been shown, we humans are pretty good at drawing arbitrary boundaries. Being the masters of their own destinies will probably alleviate issues in some respects in so much as it would be harder interference of foreign powers (which a number of regimes can do legitimately), though it does not mean that the resulting system will be efficient in dealing with it. Sometimes animosity run deep, but vanish for some reasons (e.g. looking at the once belligerent German-French relationship). It is likely however, that at some point someone will try to exploit these ethnic/religious/economic/whatever differences for their own gain. And I think it is dependent on the structure of the society and governance whether it can be resolved in a peaceful manner. These things may not even happen actively. Examples in the Western world probably include the eventual marginalization of violent racists (such as neo-nazis) in most countries, or the eventual demise of communist anti-government movements. These things still flare up (as with the recent refugee crisis) yet do not have the momentum to destabilize the whole country.

I am pretty confident that it is way further off, unless you are talking about improvements of means we got today. There is still a large gap when it comes to practical uses of nanotechnologies, especially for medical applications.

You are aware this are papers alone that look at consensus among the community? If anything this a lot of work to look at how much people agree on a thing. The actual work that are part of the consensus are in the thousands of publications by now. Also, as others have pointed out (especially take a look at the provided links), not knowing specific details does not mean that one does not have a good idea of the overall picture.

Except the video is not about legislature but about preconceptions.

All things considered, exams are trivial. After all, these are relatively short-term efforts. Building a sustainable life and being able to care for people other than yourself, much less so.

This is assuming that self-awareness is a trait that could be selected for. But self-awareness is not well defined to begin with. We do not have a perfect grasp on degrees and differences, for example. As such we only have a rough idea of how self-aware other animals may be. As a matter of fact we cannot classify our own self-awareness very well for that matter (other that in a very descriptive way). We know more about the neuronal pathways that may affect awareness (mostly due to lesion studies, i.e. looking when things become odd). Moreover, it is perfectly possible that self-awareness is just a consequence of complex brain function.

I do not think this is that uncommon. I have the same, especially for very long projects. And I am certain that everyone at a given point will have the same feeling in their job (to various degrees). What keeps me engaged is either the next step or what I can do once I figured something out. Certainly it is not necessarily an indication of a chemical imbalance, but rather of lack of interest. I also disagree that the world is a horrible place. Rather, the world has no interest in either of us and for this very reason I'd rather do stuff and carve my own niche rather than wait that somehow magically a spot for me appears. Sure, we will all die and it won't matter if we existed or not. Yet in the meantime there is plenty to do and only can decide how you want to fill up your time.

It is important to keep in mind that the triune brain is used as a simplified model. As such it has certain uses (as every other model) without being very accurate in detail. I think that subscribing is not the accurate term but rather it is a model with a limited range of usefulness (e.g. to describe overarching themes) and which fails to describe specifics. In the latter case one would switch to more detailed models. Or, in other words, neuroscientists know very well the limitations of the triune model and when it can be useful to use at least parts of it.

I have a bit of a problem with that. There is no hard way to measure levels of justification and invariably standards will change over time. Thus, using such a mushy concept to allow civilian deaths is not something that I can easily agree with. For example, if a state sponsors terrorism resulting in a few deaths per year, does that justify military action? What if the a state does not sponsor it, but is just corrupt? Do economic interests justify war? How about human rights abuse and if so at what level (the latter would almost be quite an ironic casus bellli, if at the same time we would allow these abuses to happen in a military context). Also, this is without touching legal issues, which may be at conflict with ethical considerations. The WWII argument would require a lengthy post from someone far more knowledgeable than me, However, there have been a number of articles based on military records that have looked into the effects of e.g. operation Gomorrah or other large scale destruction of civilian structures. While there are very different nuances the general consensus (again, based on the little I had read) is that a) the value was in the destruction of the militarily usable structures (i.e. infrastructure and logistics) whereas b) the civilian deaths had no favorable influence on the war outcome and c) to some degree the large destruction was due to the limits of the military technology as high-precision bombing was simply not feasible. It would also be a mistake to attribute the effectiveness of the Soviets to brutality. After all they invested the largest amount of man-power into the conflict. Also, it is hard to see how brutality toward the civilian population would actually helped their effectiveness.

See the issue is that you treat speculations (without calculation or sourcing) as facts and construe speculative narratives with this as as basis. Someone without any knowledge on the topic could mistake our opinion as facts and that is something I severely disagree with. Take your first paragraph. You do not even try to find values regarding how much the protein (Cry to be precise) is produced vs amount sprayed. You just speculate. Specifically you claim that organic farmers use them only in spot treatment. What you completely neglect is that there are guidelines on their use. One reason is that If the spray just the protein it degrades quickly. Thus, if you do not apply enough and repeatedly, you have underdosage. And THAT is the condition that favors resistance formation. To increase the amount farmers often do not spray the protein but genetically modified Bacillus strains (yes instead of GMO crops you got GMO bacteria, chew on that). But even then the typical application is ca. 1-2 lbs per acre every 3-10 days. If we take a weekly application with 1 lb each and have a crop life of 4 months, we have applied 16 lbs of material on the plants. The only other effective means would be to use alternative (and potentially more toxic) insecticides. This and the narrow range of targets usually requires the use of Bt sprays with other insecticides. EPA has published concentrations of Cry variants in all GMO plants which averages out to about 10 ng/mg dry weight. For corn the yield is about 7000 lb dry tons per acre so we get roughly 7 lbs per acre throughout one cycle. So the expected amount on the field in one harvest cycle is roughly the same with either method, or at least not hugely different. But here is the real kicker: spray applications is, as every farmer will tell you, not homogeneous. Rather depending on time from spray, the type of application and other factors (e.g. rain, wind) you will have large differences in the final concentrations. Thus, if you underapply you do not control pest efficiently. In contrast the toxins produced by the plant accumulate precisely where they are supposed to act. With all other factors being equal and using Bio 101 one would conclude that a point application (i.e. in the plant) would greatly reduce dilution effects. And again, the use of Bt-GMO plants (which typically is still supplemented with other insecticides) has reduced the use of total inecticide use compared ot just using Bt spray + other insecticides (as shown in the USDA report I mentioned earlier). Again, every agricultural practice has ecological issues (not only GMOs) and it is important to follow the data in these discussions. Many people invest serious time investigating these challenges and neglecting all reports and studies and insist on throwing your opinion around without referring to any of them: a) does not do the issue justice. Ecological and health impacts of how we utilize the environment is just too important to just form discussions based on opinion and gut feeling. b) is incredibly arrogant towards researchers who worked hard to obtain funds to the research only to be dismissed by either interest group because it does not fit their respective narrative. I should add that I focus here on the way the biology is misrepresented and am not arguing the economic side, which requires a separate discussion in the broader context of patented seeds (or food for that matter). Just by being GMO does not make it commodity that follows different economic rules.

Also, I fail to see how having that info public is helpful in any way. I mean, it is obvious if you manage a project and share assignments with co-workers but if you it just for you it seems a bit pointless to me.

I like to visualize human development as pancake. First we are like batter, unfinished and kind of yucky. Then on the hot pan we see and smell the potential, but is still a bit wet and useless. Once done it is perfect, tasty has all the nice bits and depending on preference you can keep it fluffier or more on the crispy side. Once it gets stale it is still a perfectly alright pancake, but you wished you had gotten it earlier. Also, I am hungry.