CharonY

As swansont said these rules are set by homeowner's associations, so they are not law. These associations typically want to preserve a certain look of a given neighbourhood, and often require certain optical arrangements of your home. This may include certain colour of your house, a certain look of your frontyard etc. Some apparently also think that clotheslines may look ugly and diminish the value of their area. But sometimes theses people are also just idiots on a powertrip. edit: Cross-posted

If only taking what is described in OP the evidence seems to be rather weak to me. From the limited information it seems that the only argument is that for some reasons bird song is supposedly more similar to speech than other forms of vocal communication, which does not seem to be very conclusive (e.g. how are they more similar). This all does not even address the point of what other potential factors are related to speech evolution. It does not need to be one or the other, it could have been a multi-purpose tool from the get-go. Even birds have non-mating related calls and in a number of mammalian species vocalization is used as a warning signal (again, mating unrelated). In other apes vocalization serves quite a number of purposes, including emotional expression that are not all related to mating. It is not implausible that it is one piece of the puzzle, but how large this piece is and how it relates to other elements would require much more work and I imagine it would be very tricky to get that data (as we are limited in what we could do experiment-wise). That being said, the idea is not new, Darwin already proposed that things like culture and potentially language arose from sexual selection. From the area of linguistics there are actually arguments against this as there it is typically assumed that flexibility and information transfer (a whole subset of this branch deals with so-called "honest" communication) is one of the inherent elements of human language. However, under sexual selection, exaggerated displays of particular traits are selected for (including for instance loudness and/or specific elements or complexity of mating calls that apparently can be used by the female to gauge suitability of her partner). This would be a counter-mechanism to flexible communication that conveys a plethora of information. Also, under these conditions, males would be the main communicators.

Do you have data somewhere? Also, is there a reason why you limit it to white collar only? If productivity is an indicator of living standards, why would it only apply to a specific category (or conversely, why would white collar productivity be an indicator for the whole population?). Moreso, isn't it actually tricky to measure and as such not really that beneficial as a criterion? On a general note: The values I found were PPP so they are adjusted to some extent. But even by hour the USA is still typically comfortably close to other Western nations (though dropped a few places a while ago). http://www.bls.gov/ilc/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm#table03 There was also OECD chart showing that, but I would need to dig it out. Among the G7 US is leading, though the other countries are catching up (or are too close to call). What you may be confusing it is that the growth rate has massively diminished in recent times, though it is true for most developed nations (which kind of makes sense). Although it appears to be quite large in the US even in comparison (although Norway actually has a reduction).

A few quick comments on the paper: The major strength and also limitation is that they tested one specific hypothesis: whether sexual selection can alleviate fitness constraints by selection of males. Thus the study is specifically geared to show this effect experimentally but thereby obviously only addresses only one part of the puzzle. The result is that empirically it can. Though it is not clear how that relates to species where sexual selection is not known to be a major factor. Or maybe there is more sexual selection going on than acknowledged universally as some of the competition may happen on the molecular side (but that is material for further study). The study design itself is alright, strength being that they let it run for 6 years (long-term experiments are just so rare, as most are capped to the time limit when you shove the grad student or postdoc out). They did two lines, the first with 90 F to 10 M or 10 F and 90 M with only three replicates each (still must have been a logistic nightmare to maintain). Then they did a divergent line with competition of five males to one female (12 replicates) or monogamy (20 replicates). From these again 3 lines each were maintained.

In some ways I found the history surrounding the Mongol empire even more fascinating than that of the Romans. The latter had the most sophisticated military (for about a millennium) and much of it was down to superior organization and tactics. All backed by a strong economy. The mongols on the other hand started off as nomads (though well-versed in warfare) who initially were illiterate (until Temujin) and picked up everything required to build an empire and things like siege warfare in one go. Finally resulting in an empire that shaped European as well as Asian history on a massive scale.

A few things have to be kept in mind in that context. The first is that the nuclear weapons did not represent the highest amount of civilian casualties in the conflict. At the same time it is not quite clear whether the bombs were the main factor of surrender, or whether e.g. the attack of the Soviets was the element that resulted in that decision. In either case it would be speculation, but as it stands one cannot state with certainty that the bomb ended the conflict (for the same reason that one cannot state that the Soviets did). Finally, during that time all parties at least willingly accepted civilian casualties if not actively promoted it. It is a dangerous thing (and a bit of a folly) to try to assign modern values to historic events. It is close enough to make you think that at that time we shared the same values, but in truth public perception change radically within one or two generation (sometimes even faster and there are plenty of examples).

Well other organophosphates include DNA and RNA. I am pretty sure you have little choice in ingesting those . That being said typical diets are not limited (typical sources include milk, meat, legumes to name a few) and supplementation is generally only necessary in cases of certain diseases (but are available). The opposite is sometimes necessary (i.e. phosphate limitation).

It depends a lot on the specific purpose of the curve and the experimental design. I.e. it depends what you want to use the curve for. The most common one being the analysis of the dynamic range and amplification efficiency of your assay and/or quality control purposes. However, if you are looking e.g. at samples with large variance in expression (as you mention housekeeping I assume you are measuring mRNA) a dilution series may also be appropriate to assess how much you have to dilute/concentrate your sample to be able to measure your various samples within a reasonable range of cycles (i.e. fitting your samples within your dynamic range). If you already have a good idea which make have the highest expression you could use that one to do the dilution series and gain both information of dynamic range and required dilution for comparative runs However, in these examples the dilution series is base on using your gene of interest. A use of standard curves is for the actually quantification process. Here you require an experimental setup where you can prepare dilutions series of an independent sample (e.g. WT, untreated and so on). Here the independent sample is really used as calibrant against which expression (normalized against an internal control) is used. So with regard to your question, it really depends on what you want the purpose of the particular dilution series is. Again, I would recommend going through your notes, evaluate what biological question you have (e.g. influence of mutation, influence of treatment etc.). Take a look of the required controls (with a look at the MIQE standards as a guideline) and design your experiment from the ground up. Typically it should become very clear what you need to combine (or not) to gain specific answers (e.g. if PCR efficiency has already been assessed you probably only need a one or two-point just to validate whether you have any issues, rather than a whole dilution series, for example).

It depends a bit on the type of analysis (absolute vs relative), however it would be easier to explain if you outline what you have read and where the confusion is. I would also advise you to read up on MIQE standards (Bustin et al 2010, BMC Mol Biol 11:74, open source) and follow-up on that. As a side note I would also like to point out that there are no true housekeeping genes, especially when considering conditions that severely affect growth. Many, if not most, ignore this point, but theoretically one has to establish stability of the HG for the condition(s) to be tested first. It should be noted that the control is mostly for the biochemical part (i.e. extraction and assay setup). Theoretically, if you did not screw up the instrumental differences day-to-day will be much less than the biological + sample handling variance. With some training the latter will be minimized leaving you with the biological variance, which is really what is of interest to you.

Lovers of good food?

Luckily, I have access and if there is interest in details I can provide/discuss them (of course I cannot share the pdf online). The overall finding was that fitness was maintained better after conditions exposing mutation load (i.e. inbreeding), which, afaik one of the few data that actually demonstrate the proposed benefit (and no doubt the reason it got into Nature at all). That being said, it is of course just one study (others have been far less clear in their outcome) and it will require more work to see whether this is something special to the system tested or more universal (especially when looking into cases were sexual selection is not that dominant).

Cheers, I will take a look at it. Quite fresh off the press, too. After skimming the abstract it seems that the next step to look into would be the molecular mechanisms affecting fitness.

That in isolation is actually a tricky statement. Embryonic development does require feedback and input from a suitable environment to guide the gestation. This true for other tissues, too. I.e. development always has to take the environment into account. Theoretically you could envision an artificial system that takes care of that, but it still means that the developing organisms still requires cues from its environment, i.e. it is not self-contained in that context. It is also tricky to tie it down to DNA, as again, without the proper cellular content, the DNA does nothing. That is why we are not able to crate artificial cells, just inject DNA into existing ones. I think this may be another of those points were our desire of having clear boundaries clashes with the realities of biology.

Actually, diversification has been put forward quite often as a the reason of having sexual reproduction. However, that is not enough. Many asexually reproducing organisms are able to have exchange of genetic material. Thus, theoretically they can claim both advantages, recombination as well as more efficient reproduction. The question why even two sexes exist has not been conclusively solved yet. But if that is already an issue, it is clear while adding more is even more unlikely. Some advanced hypotheses anchor the stability around maintenance of certain cellular systems that co-evolved with the meiotic machinary, IIRC.

Well, it is a simple narrative, but unfortunately usually wrong (that is why I wanted to discuss it in the first place). Germany was economically not in a hugely bad place industrially speaking. I.e. it did not had to rebuild much physically, compared to quite a few other participants of WWI (and very unlike WWII). And the most crucial part of stabilizing the economy was done before Hitler was relevant. He is just such a dominant figure of that era that it is easy to attribute everything to him, which in this case is inaccurate. Edit: one should also add that even in a dictatorship, especially for larger countries there are constraints, e.g. in the form of the administrative apparatus. Just because you do not care it does not mean that you can get things done fast. You could have everyone shot and replace it with different people but then the system may actually become even less efficient and you get less done. So, depending on system, it could be faster, but it does not mean that it is necessary more efficient overall (at least not under all conditions).

The most likely answer is that sexual reproduction is inherently inefficient. If you think about it, you will notice that it carries a two-fold cost over asexual reproduction. I.e. an asexually reproducing organism has a much higher potential to reproduce (i.e. double as fast as sexual reproduction with all other things equal). More groups further limit reproductive potential without providing any additional benefit of having two sexes.

The reparation had a strong psychological role. But Hitler was certainly not the only one, pretty every German leader during Weimar had blamed or lamented the Versaille treaty as par of the course. But here is the thing, as I mentioned, during parliamentary process, things got done well (under Schacht) by introducing the Rentenmark and stopping hyperinflation. Use of emergency powers things got worse before Hitler appointed Schacht again. Note that the necessary economic changes to counterbalance the deflation was done using the usual routes and would have worked the same during parliamentary process, at least as far as I know.The initial "fixing" of the economy was by appointing Schacht rather than using emergency decrees. In other words there is little evidence that it has done the German economy any good (but certainly has made things worse, first under Bruening, then, again later under Hitler's tenure when he essentially marginalized Schacht in favor of war economy. So while your general point may be true, the German economy is a very bad example.

The problem with crowdsourced data is that without supervision it is hard to be certain that data is consistent and useful. If you have junk data added to the pile it may skew the results. Also climate change is a very slow process, if you do measurement every day for a few years there would not be much of a trend, so people will actually not notice anything. But if you look at long time frames, a trend emerges, but many people cannot wrap their head around that time frame.

If the growth conditions are ok they will grow. Milk is not their exclusive habitat, they are just happened to use for dairy production. But they are also around in soil, water, intestinal tracts, etc.

There are so-called MIC assays, in which you measure the inhibitory potential of agents (such as antibiotics) on bacterial growth. Typically it is not done microscopically as you would require stains to see which cells are dead or alive and morphological changes are only partially diagnostic. Instead, either growth kinetics is measured in a concentration-dependent manner to see where inhibition starts. Alternatively, quick tests are done by adding your compound to a bacterial lawn and measure the inhibition zone.

The process is a simple reduction of Au(III) to Au(I) (and some other Au species in lower amounts). It is part of a detoxification process, which essentially means that the amount produced is mostly limited to the area around the bacteria. While there were hints that some are actually able to use dissimilatory Au reduction for respiration (which is known to be the case e.g. for iron) I do not think that such bacteria have been identified nor does C. metallidurans use it. But even then, respiration would happen at a higher rate but is still massively inefficient as the energy yield is typically quite low. As the process is rate limited and does not yield pure product, it is easy to see why it is inefficient. It is more interesting as a part of how deposits of gold could have formed by biotic processes over very, very long stretches of time.

Or it is because people do not understand and have an agenda inhibiting their ability to understand it. Heck, even the catholic church has acknowledged evolution as proven fact. And the assumption that no one in their right mind would dispute facts is quite obviously wrong. Unless, of course you assume that politicians as well as a significant amount of the population is not right in their mind (although it would explain a lot). That being said, is there anything to discuss or did you just want to soapbox a bit?

Are you reading it in Latin or a translation? In the original I seem to recall that the third person use was not terribly confusing at all. But then I mostly remember the first few paragraphs as we had memorize them for class, so I may be misremembering. You may also be interested in "The Secret History of the Mongols" which was written after Ghengis Khan's death for the Mongol royal family. Or about Mongol warfare in general. Winning against overwhelming odds was kind of their thing for a very long stretch of time.

Loss of nutrients is more related to general agricultural use than to wastewater I would gather, though one would look at the actual flux. That being said, the use of treated sewage sludge is already in use (including the US) but there are massive concerns about the many contaminants and their influence on human health, but also on soil biota. It is not really a yuck factor (manure is yucky too and while people complain about smell, it has been in common use for a very, very long time), but rather emerging evidence that we may add a lot of problems into our food chain as well increase prevalence of antibiotic resistances (although this is also true for manure use). But I do not understand the main issue here, as if anything we are overfertilizing, e.g. in order to get rid of manure. If we want to talk about sustainability, wastewater use seems in an agricultural context to be the wrong end of the discussion. Rather, the first question has to be what form of agriculture would be sustainable whilst ensuring sufficient access to food.

Actually, that part would require further inspection. Productivity in the US is still very high. According to OECD statistics (http://stats.oecd.org/) GDP per capita (PPP) is quite high in the US, surpassed only by Luxembourg and Norway. Nonetheless according to a number of statistics on standard of living there is not a huge disparity, i.e. US is always within the top 10, though rarely in the top. It seems that after a certain level of productivity there is not a strong correlation with standard of living anymore.