CharonY

I think accepting the fact that you will be wrong quite often is a prerequisite to the learning process. You do not necessarily already need the insights to do this. Rather, general insights help you assessing how wrong you may be.

Well, it is not only an European thing, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt have all more Syrian refugees. It is true that specifically the Gulf states do not appear to get involved much, though.

Could you define "vast majority"? Numbers that I have seen seem to point that somewhere around 40-50% are from war regions (though there are other types of refugees of course and with the largest group not from war regions being from the Balkans). I think you are conflating two elements. The first is that they do not stay in the first safe region. My question is, would you? Once you are out of immediate danger would you stop thinking about the future and be complacent being housed and fed with no obvious perspectives? The second aspect is the claim that the migrants are actually only there for the benefits. While I have read that often, it is not backed up by any data I could find. The questions are: do migrants prefer welfare over jobs? And if it is welfare they are after, do they really go to countries with the largest allowances? Now, during the processing (which can two years and used to be even longer) refugees obtain the equivalent of the subsistence limit of the respective countries. So basically there is little incentive to choose a country based on that. Now, the next question for any ambitious welfare moocher is where can I get the most benefit after asylum is granted. Now this is actually even trickier as the actual benefits will differ quite a bit on how long you worked in a given country. But there are a lot of different schemes that may provide additional benefits (i.e. for clothing or furniture) that may be present in one, but absent in another. That being said, looking at OECD values in terms cash benefits as percentage of GDP, Germany is in the middle of the pack (3.8%), whereas Belgium (8.2) and Denmark (7.9) spend less. Nonetheless Germany sees a disproportionate amount of applications. To find the eligible cash equivalent is actually non-trivial but solely looking at benefits, there is little reason to favor Germany that much. Maybe it is, not the main reason for choosing a country after all?

Why do you think that it should decrease?

IIRC the conversion factors are based on an old paper from Warburg (40s-50s) on enolase. The values are reasonably close to BSA (~1.5, I think) so that it is still in common use as a rough estimate. If done accurately you would derive factors for each of your proteins of interest, but typically UV is used to get rough estimates, anyway. A more precise method involves using factors based on quantity of aromatic AAs in your protein.

I thought something was different. I assumed it was the glasses.

..... what the heck did I miss?

Traditionally isolates are considered to be the same species within ~ 70% similarity using DNA-DNA hybridization. E. coli is a species and of course there will be members with different DNA composition, just as any two humans will have differences, yet belong to the same species. Speciation is indeed faster in bacteria but if they accumulate sufficient changes (i.e. by convention above the threshold value) they would considered different species. Note that the the line between species in bacteria is even more arbitrary than in other organisms. Also, as a consequence of more DNA sequencing numerous bacterial species have been reclassified.

How do you define "order of evolution"?

For high temps silicon and mineral oils are well suited, but are really only necessary if you keep the bath at high temps for long times (high throughput PCRs are often used in these baths kept at denaturing temps). Most ethylene glycol mixtures are suited up to 100 C, which is generally enough for melting experiments. However, in lab courses I know people doing denaturation at 95C simply with water. It depends a bit on the desired throughput and accuracy.

No, there are many more factors in play that renders a plant perennial. Just because it becomes sterile it would not be able to suddenly change its physiology.

But that is the point of posturing, isn't it? Israel does not need to, as it has the military superiority.

Well, he never had any position per se, he was just a grad student in chemical engineering.

From what I understand it seems to me that for an ideal political discourse the participants should have the information that allows them to make fact-based decisions. Thus, it would be beneficial to have access to education for as many people as possible to enable support of policies that may actually enable a given desired outcome. I.e. it would emancipate the voters from the politician's (and lobbyists) rhetoric, so to say. Of course there are also many matters that are so complex that even the best models would be at best speculative. It does not mean that uneducated should not vote. But rather it would be in their best interest to figure out whether their vote would actually result in what they hope to achieve. Either that or I need more coffee.

Also, it should be noted that the nonsense from this student should not be seen as the standard of the whole University (as already noted). In fact the University issued a statement: Also there a handful of publications out there from the University that are some decently cited (though far from class-leading). Or in other words, crackpots are everywhere and they should not be considered representative of a given population. If that was the case, imagine what SFN would be considered to be...

It would be incredibly inefficient and almost impossible to control the dosage. Typically anything larger is provided intravenously. That is why insulin (~5.8 kDa) pills are not available, for example (but there seems to be some work on it).

Well, there is a lot that can go wrong and without looking at the raw data or precisely revising protocols it is tricky to see whether there is something off with the protocol. That being said, Y2H has been shown to create massive amounts of false positives, if conduct large meta- and/or validation studies. However, typically under controlled conditions it is not as bad as what you described.

Well, the displayed biological knowledge is as limited as the mathematical, so at least there is some consistency here.

Typically with immobilized thrombin you will have less or no residual thrombin. In some cases digests seem to be less efficient (though not reproducibly so).

There is also immobilized thrombin that is covalently bound which saves a step over most biotin-thrombin protocols.

Your lecturer is referring to small molecules which are completely different beasts than proteins (most likely organohalogens or similar bioaccumulative compounds). Typically, proteins will be digested heavily by proteases (or bacterial actions) during the passage. Even if they don't, they have to be taken up actively by intestinal cells (where further degradation may occur). That is a rather rare event, but it is quite possible.

If immobilized thrombin or affinity columns are too pricey I guess you are limited to whatever separation method you have at hand (as new columns are not cheap either). Without knowing your target protein it is tricky to say but at least in theory reversed phase or ion exchange prep HPLC should do the trick. Even if inactive I would try to avoid additional contaminants in crystallization experiments as much as possible. Also, I typically check purity of overexpression purificaitions via LCMS as sometimes stuff stick to the column and get co-purified, which can be a problem if the desired proteins is not very highly expressed,

Change in genetics are are what causes inheritable morphological changes. OP specifically mentioned wings. In a number (if not most) of species the evolution is speculative, hence the insistence on immediate positive selection is unfounded. Most known elements, however, point to outgrowths of wings from a variety of structures (such as gills or arms) and not some completely novel, additional structures.

That is not typically how things happen. Mutations are typically neutral or sometimes detrimental, beneficial ones are very rare. For example, mutations in enzymes tend to happen in duplicated genes as they would not be selected against (or, as you put it, add overhead). The cost of duplication is, as a whole often not very high (i.e. only weak or no selection). For example, in organisms with bipedalism, changes in the arm strength is probably not associated with a high cost. Over time changes may accumulate that significantly change its structure from the precursor.

While that is partially true for wings as the intermediates are still functional appendages, it should be noted that changes do not need to be beneficial themselves. As long as they are not heavily selected against, they may persist and even spread throughout a population either by chance (e.g. drift) or by co-selection, for example.