CharonY

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.

My guess is that OP is still rather young and thus hobbies make up a bulk of their time. I would agree that for most people work tends to be front and center. Hobbies tend to be something introduced if you think you have a common ground. The opposite is true if the meeting is specifically centered around a hobby, of course. But then people would assume common interests and soon it will drift towards" so what are you doing for a living?". Also there are plenty of people who are (initially) not very good or interested in a given hobby but may have joined in, say, because of their SO or friends. But eventually they may enjoying it and getting pretty good or even better than their partners... An anecdotal example would be the number of academics I know whose abilities are clearly in the intellectual area, yet they massively enjoy getting humiliated playing sports. If they were inclined only to do what they are good at their hobbies would be far more sedentary, I guess. Considering that there is little biology to back up the assertions in OP I am moving this to the Lounge for the time being.

I intended to dig out some books prior to writing a response, but since it does not seem that I will find the time for a more detailed response, I will post in bits from what I remember. The claim of reparations and Hitler implies that a) the economy of Germany was in shambles, specfically prior to Hitler's rise to power b) that reparations were a major influence and that c) dictatorial measures under Hitler finally fixed the issue. To discuss this, we have to take a look at the German economy in the interwar period. First, hyperinflation. In order for it to be a major factor in this discussion, it has to be assumed that it happened just until Hitler "fixed" the economy. However, the major part of hyperinflation occurred between 1921-24, way before Hitler was considered a major player. Subsequently German economy was stabilized, widely contributed to competent policies by Hjalmar Schacht (under Stresemann). Subsequently, the Germany economy saw significant rise in economic power, decrease in unemployment, which were partially co-financed with the Dawes plan. While reparations were a major factor, in the overall economic situation, it did not hinder economic growth. It should also be noted that Germany as a whole was in a pretty strong position in terms of production as WWI hardly touched its infrastructure. Now the actually financial crisis started with the crash of Wall street and the onset of the Great Depression. In a nutshell, a bad situation was made worse by Bruening, who was appointed chancellor. His policy was severe austerity which has been recognized to lead to a severe deflation (not inflation) of German economy, leading to an increase in unemployment. The reparations here were to some extent a psychological factor. Based on letters and other documents from Bruening and his cabinet it became clear that they wanted fight depression by curbing expenditure and thereby also demonstrate their inability to pay reparations, as a basis for further negotiations. Funds that were already allocated to e.g. infrastructure, which, ironically, would have had a chance to improve Germany’s economic situation, were scrapped under these policies. Now we have two situations of post-war Germany. One of relative growth, which was under a somewhat functional parliamentary system (the constitution had some built-in instabilities which were not recognized at that time). Then, we have one of bad fiscal policy. Interestingly Bruening was governing under a dictatorial rule using emergency powers, the same that Hitler was going to invoke after his grab to power. So in this case, the ability of dictatorial powers to “get things done” plunged Germany into a deep economic crisis. Now for the last part, did Hitler “fix” the economy? There have been long text books describing why it was not the case as a whole. But in the short term he appointed Hjalmar Schacht as Minister of Economics and he started programmes that were stopped under Bruening to address the immediate issue of unemployment. However, he also heavily lobbied against military spending. That, arguably resulted in the eventual loss of his portfolio. Had Hitler decided to go with Schacht’s vision, potentially a sustainable economy could have emerged. Instead he went with Goering and resulting unsustainable war economy. The only way out once they walked that path was to force the expenditures to conquered areas and such can hardly be considered a fix at all. The instability once Hitler started these war-oriented policies was well-recognized even during that time. To summarize, there was significant economic growth (the golden 20s) that overcame hyperinflation before the Wall street crash using parliamentary powers. Crash was initiator of economic issue (rather than reparations) and was exarcebated by emergency rulings under Bruening (i.e. non-parliamentary powers made things worse). Immediate fix after Hitler got power were plans from the same guy who managed the growth in the 20s but then converted it into unsustainable war economy.

Most of us would not be here as either we or, more likely our direct ancestors would not have survived to produce us.

I think that is true for many people. Reading experience is better with paper, also I prefer reference works, such as text books or historic writing in book format as it is much easier to track back to certain passages. While it is easier to mark things electronically, I always found that half-remembered passages are much easier to find with books rather than using search functions or similar. I guess it has something to do how spatial memory works. But I found myself moving so much that most reading for entertainment just had to be delegated to electronic readers for practical purposes...

Precisely, in vitro models (including chip-based ones) are currently only useful for a limited number of applications and are nowhere near being able to supplant animal tests. There is funding to improve the systems, but it is still in its infancy stages. Cosmetic testing has been reduced massively over the last decade and has been effectively been banned in the EU and at least is considered for banning in the US. It is certainly not seen as a requirement anymore. One of the reasons behind that is that there are not many new formulations of cosmetics so that no new tox information is required. In addition cosmetic testing does not actually rely on toxicity information, rather specific endpoints such as skin irritation on contact. These can actually tested quite well in tissue cultures.

To be precise, nociceptors do not cause sensation of pain. They are generated in the brain and signals from nociceptors can lead to activity of the respective brain areas. Now, emotional distress has some overlaps, but there are also distinct differences and again, the brain is the important factor and not so much the respective sensory pathways. For some references: Eisenberger, Nat Rev Neuroscience, 2012; Wager et al. N Engl J Med 2013 368:15.

In that case take a look at control of FDR via Benjamini Hochberg (e.g. Hochberg, Benjamini 1990 Stat. Med. 9 811-8, which discusses it in the context of medical research and makes it quite easy to understand)

Additional things to keep in mind: samples have to be independent, you need sufficient N, and from the sound of it you are looking at more variables than samples, which requires multiple testing correction such as control of FDR.

They read more like a curiosity. In newspapers of that year there is also quite a bit of criticism, including from a number of German blogs, but also from a German provider of certification services. The author has in a few cases threatened with lawsuits and in case of the certification service (TUEV) managed to get an injunction to prohibit them to state that there is no perpetuum mobile. I.e. it is more a human interest story rather than a science story.

The thing is, law enforcement is state business and I am not sure how much the feds can enforce policies or are able to investigate misconduct. They can provide or deny certain assistance to promote adoption of certain policies but beyond that their reach may be limited (but I could be wrong).

And even that only in a very narrow, arbitrarily defined context.

I could make the point for virtually anything, including plastics, personal care products etc. In fact is actually data for potential health hazards of common flame retardants and plastic materials. Yet, we still happily use them. For the outlined position to be internally consistent one would either have to call to the dangers of everything (including oxygen) which is clearly unrealistic. And yes we also have negative data on bacon. We still use it freely. What is your point? Just because we used it for a long time its health effects we should consider it safer? We have evidence that it has negative health impacts, why do you label it as safer than something for which we have no evidence? As can be seen, the whole basis of risk assessment in OP is essentially gut feeling and therefore not conducive to scientific discussions.