CharonY

Absolutely. Especially since Iain Banks is no more...

Actually I think in most religions (e.g. outside the related abrahamistic ones) there is little evidence that humans were formed after the mystical creators. In fact. In fact, if anything these forces were personified and if anything were modeled after humans, rather than the other way around. I.e, there is no reference with regards how the deities may have looked like but they are often depicted as humanoid. There are other creation myths, of course that do not refer to humanoid beings per se, In the Haida tradition Raven has created humans, for example. Of course in their mythology the concept of humanoid does not make a lot of sense. The Australian aborigines have various creation myths surrounding Dreamtime in which shapes are but fleeting concepts. So especially with what Phi and others have said, the premise does not really hold.

Depending on the means there a lot of potential approaches revolving around a standard immunoassay or mass spectrometry. As for an immuno approach, a bit of a separation as in an inverse Western. Also specificity would be better if detection was conducted using ABs raised against the proteins.

Since I have some experience with the German system (though a bit outdated) I would like to respond to some aspects here. Overall, in first year Uni you will see a distinct difference between German and and US students. The distribution in the US is much broader and you will have to adjust first-year lectures towards the lower end. This is especially true when mathematics is involved, even at a very low level. That is not to say that the US system is absolutely abysmal, they are pretty much middle of the pack when it comes to OECD countries, but certainly not the top performer. It should be noted that in the old system the top-tier school track (gymnasium) was aimed to provide an education level somewhat close to a two-year bachelor. Now that has changed quite a bit, concomitantly with adding a bachelor system to university. The vocational part was an important element, however it applied to the mid- and lower tier secondary schools and there was to my knowledge no system that a) had a mixed vocational system with school, you go to a company after school and b) the companies are not forced to take them in, but there were incentives to do so. The German system has one serious issue it shares with the US system but for totally unrelated reasons. In the US the high schools are heavily financed on the local (district level). As such it is harder to perform well coming from these schools. In Germany, surprisingly there is also a correlation with parent income and academic attainment (though more moderate IIRC, but I may be misremembering), despite the fact that universities are practically free (they are rolling back fees almost everywhere and even then it was not more than maybe 100-500 euros per semester). One of the criticisms was that the split in secondary schools happens too fast (at age 9-10) and even worse, it is not solely based grades or tests (and there was some heavy discussion whether grades have any meaning at that age where developmental differences are vast), but teachers also take their family and socioeconomic background into account. The reasoning (which is faulty imo) is that a student from a working class will lack the family support to attain academic achievement. That being said, there is a chance of students switching tracks later on, however people tend to perform within the context they are given, so extra effort is required to be able to switch. One could blame parents for following the recommendations, but quite obviously the class thinking is still well and active in Germany. There is quite a lot of criticism surrounding the German system, but for ideological reasons it is not going to change. It should also be noted that the German system has alternatives, though the tripartite system is the biggest element.

Plants are long lived for a variety of reasons, including their ability to just shut off areas of themselves without killing themselves. That being said, there is little evidence for immortality in the practical sense. From a quick search it appears that the oldest individual plant specimen are only about 5-6k years old.

Just because your body produces against something does not mean that it is actually harmful. Autoimmune diseases are caused by the body creating antibodies against itself, for example. Take Chadn737's advice. I would recommend starting off with reviews (in the various search engines, including pubmed you can often filter for them) to give an overview about the topic.

1) I agree, but the same is already the case with modern agriculture in general 2) My biggest concern overall, especially with the existence of quasi-monopolies. 3) For the vast majority of GMOs I think the biochemical consequences are lower than the context they are being used for (e.g. pesticide use). I do not think it is worse than the toxins we spray around already. I think we underestimate the consequences of modern agricultural practices and are overly concerned about a (relatively) minor aspect of it. For example, the majority of our foodstock is based on a handful of highly inbred strains. And there already have been massive losses due to viral infections. Just because we have been comfortable with it for a longer time, it does not mean it is safe or safer.

Yes.

That is not my specialty, but there is unlikely to be a database of protein turnover. To make sense this would generally be in vivo studies that are quite tricky to conduct with a high amount of biological variance, which makes it a bad measure for databases. You may be lucky that someone has measured it for a specific system and you could use that as a rough estimate for yours, and if you are really lucky it may be even the same. That being said, there are papers such as Vicentic et al Brain Res. 1999 Sep 11;841(1-2):1-10. that provide some (indirect) ideas about turnover rates. With respect for gene expression to protein production, that is probably not a limiting factor as in most cellular systems the rates are very high. I.e. only few minutes are required from gene induction to the ability to measure the first proteins.

This impression comes from the fact that the preceding dynasty was so prolific and well-known to European history (Marco Polo playing some role in that). That, in turn was because the Yuan dynasty was a Mongolian rule and during that time they pretty much ruled over the known world and threatened the rest. A lot of interaction happened within the greater mongol empire. After overthrowing the Mongols there were more isolationist and conservative policies, concomitant with fewer technological advances than preceding dynasties. But again, many factors, including preceding Mongolian rule contributed to that. While this was the first time (probably) that advances in China were slower than their European counterpart (or, if you will, Europe was catching up), there were advances. Just at a slower pace.

This shows incredible amount of ignorance. The curriculum in medieval times in Europe were certainly not centered around natural science, at best one could call it natural philosophy (as natural sciences as such have not emerged yet) and was mix of philosophy, occult, alchemy, medicine(-ish) and theology. It certainly did not have rigorous curricula and depending on who your mentor was, you may get some knowledge in nature (probably astronomy) or not. Advances and innovations in that time were often more due to individual scholars rather than due to university-like structures as they exist today. In ancient China three forms of (large) schools existed: district schools, national academies and private academies. Throughout history smaller entities were also known, of course, but they were not listed or known as organized corporations as equivalent medieval European universities in starting in the 12th century or so. In any case, the first known private academies in China were reported to be appear in the Tang dynasty (618-907) and spread from that time. Curricula were diverse, as one could imagine though there was a strong emphasis on classics (as there was on philosophy in Europe). But this did include (in various times) books such as "The nine Chapters of the Mathematical Art", which was a collection of various scholars spannign the time of around the 10th-2nd century BCE (it does not get much more classical than that). It is also amusing that you mention Confucianism, as Confucius was probably the example of a private educator. It is true that the focus especially of imperial exams during various dynasty was often closer to what one would call a liberal arts, but then the same could be said for many European counterparts. Natural sciences departed from philosophy quite some time later. One thing to highlight are probably the Islamic traditions (including Spain) which appear to have a stronger focus on astronomy and mathematics. Nonetheless, within the various schools and academies and private tutors philoscience (which could include e.g. taoism, which also teaches quite a bit about herbal medicine). While I do not have sources about specific curricula, famous Chinese inventors went through the education route, and then became known for their expertise in e.g. mathematics, engineering, etc. Zhang Heng, for example (78-139) was a polymath that studied at the Taixue (an imperial university). He did calculate pi to 3.1466 and laid the foundation for mechanical basics picked up by later inventors and developed among others probably the first seismometer. I do not have a full biography handy, but just from those snippets I am kind of sure that he did learn one or two things more than just poems during his time as a student. It is generally noted that there was a decline of teaching quality in the Qing dynasty, in which there was a notorious absence of natural sciences which have been much more prominent in Europe at that point. However that was 1644-1912, hardly medieval or ancient. Finally, I have no clue what you mean with ancient Chinese stagnation. Chinese history is (if one reads about it, of course) incredibly dynamic and only for certain cultural reasons remained its identity (of sorts). Yet, through millenia China was a powerhouse in the region and a leading force on a world-wide scale. The silk trade was part of the dynamics that led to the rise (and fall) of empires and thoroughly shaping middle eastern and European history. China did lost out on key innovations that proved to be crucial during the industrial revolution and finally lost its powers to superior technology, but that is hardly stagnation if one look at it over a historic scale (instead of a ideology-driven goggles).

That sounds reasonable. How old is the tested glycerol and what is the pH in the final buffer? Pure glycerol only has limited effect on a buffer system (in citrate buffer a small increase in pH has been reported).

1) Temperature affects overall kinetics of the reaction, especially yeast activity. The actual temp is less important than the overall timing. I.e. if ingredients are colder, it will take a bit longer. Unless you got extreme conditions, it should not have severe effects. Note down the time that you need to get decent results at given temps and go from there. 2) You are referring to the first rise. It depends on the bread. The idea here is to aim for a given texture, that may be different to each bread type and depends on your initial knead and dough. The way it rises will depend on the gluten formation (that, in turn affects overall elasticity of your bread). If you punch it down (which is not always a thorough kneading) you will let the yeast do its work more thoroughly. The idea here is to get a more consistent and finer inner structure. In addition, several rises will result in a different taste as the yeast ferments more. This is especially relevant if you use sourdough, which contains lactobacilli that add a more acidic taste. In short, repeated rises affect texture and taste. 3) Freezing will affect the way gluten form and will affect overall structure. Even if brought to room temp again the bread will be more rubbery. Doughs that are for fridges have additional components to preserve the dough structure. 4) This has been addressed already. But again, kinetics is different and so is the final bread structure.

The OP was aimed at discussing that even if we used IQ as measure of something (whatever it is) the assessment of heritability is not what many people assume it to be (i.e. the result of genetic control). Usually these discussion revolve around the measure of IQ and I wanted to provide a bit more context rather than only that the measure of IQ is not really robust. While discussing the role of IQ as a measure is relevant, it is a bit tangential to the overall point. In this context a paper from Turkheimer et al. (Psychol Sci. 2003;14:623-628) is quite interesting in which it was shown that heritability is dependent on the socioeconomic status of tested children. In children with a low socioeconomic status the heritability of IQ is lower (i.e. environmental conditions account more to the score), whereas in affluent families the situation is reversed. What the mechanisms may be for this is, and I think that everyone in this thread is more or less on the same page with this, are unclear. What can be said according to this study, however is that the forces (whatever they may be) are different in poor environments from rich ones. So even as a squishy score, the utility here is that its distribution will vary quite a bit depending on the environment you look at. Now, this finding may impact studies that do not correct for socioeconomic status, for example (depending on the population under investigation). The Flynn effect requires a deeper discussion, I think, as there are a host of study that have tried to shed illumination on this issue. For now I should mention that one cannot infer from that heritability actually has changed. That being said, depending on which populations are being analyzed, it is fully expected (as chadn737 implied) that since the 40s significant changes would be found in heritability, depending on the populations being evaluated. As in the above example, socioeconomic changes would have an influence (it would be hard to identify equivalent groups from the 40s an today's population, for example). Likewise changes in schooling system as well as general access to information could influence the assessment of heritability. If we took a random sample of the population I would expect a higher heritability measure in the 40s as I would think that there would be a higher disparity in educational attainment, for example. This, again highlights the relevance of thinking in population distributions when one talks about heritability.

I apologize, I should have been more precise. I meant once you get into college. The correlation with school performance and poverty at lower level schooling is pretty much established and I did not mean to confuse that. Actually, I should also retract part of my statement for college as I would think that poor students would also have a harder time to excel at exams as they may lack the support structure that more affluent students may have access to. My comment was actually meant to state that the same student is not likely to receive a vastly different quality of education when visiting an ivy league or a "regular" university.

Brilliant, I was secretly hoping that someone with more in-depth knowledge would add to that part (and I was planning on citing Davies et al.).

Sounds like a typical surfactant to me. I think BASF is selling something as Pluronic L31, which has the average MW that you requested. You can look it up under e.g. http://sigmaaldrich.com using product number 435406.

Agreed, GCMS is no good. Depending on what you try to do either simple LC-UV/vis or LCMS would be much better alternatives. Rapamycin is going to contaminate the GC column badly.

One of the recurrent arguments posts that are made touch upon intelligence in humans and its heritability. Almost in every case there are serious misconceptions that result in the same type of often fruitless discussions conducted over and over again. In this thread I would like to clear up some issues to the best of my abilities. While I will stick to present literature, I am not an expert in the area of intelligence research. Hopefully, I will provide enough information to start a proper discussion or at least to clear up some low-level confusion. I will preface by stating that many studies utilize measures such as IQ, which is generally accepted not to be a precise measure of intelligence. Nonetheless there is more comparable data using this type of measurement and I will start the discussions centered around this simplified measure. The first obvious question is: "What is heritability?" What some erroneously assume is that it is fixed value that indicates the genetic influence of a given trait. For example, various literature estimate heritability of IQ to be between 0.4-0.8 and some equate that to saying that IQ is up to 80% under genetic control. However this interpretation is not correct. The estimation of heritability is given as the ratio of genetic variation to total variation in a trait within a given population. What often causes confusion is the population bit. It actually means that (in this case) up to 80% of the observed variance across individuals is genetic. This is completely different to the assertion that 80% of the trait is under genetic control. This has several consequences: 1) Obviously using this measure you cannot elucidate the contribution of environment and genetics to the individual. In other words, in one person the genetic component to their IQ may be high, in another it may be low, but the measure of heritance will not resolve that. 2) Related to that it means that looking at different populations the measure of heritability will change. It is not a fixed constant. 3) Conversely, the same population could yield very different heritability scores, depending on environmental conditions. For example, if everyone shares the same conditions, the contribution of environmental factors to IQ variance will go down and thus yielding higher heritability. The opposite is true for varied conditions. 4) In addition, heritability requires variability to make any sense. Traits that are 100% genetically controlled, but do not show variance (say, number of heads) are not defined. This again highlights that one cannot conflate heritability with genetic control. Ok, you may ask, but what about twin studies? There is evidence that e.g. identical twins have more similar IQ values than fraternal ones, for example. But even this situation is not straightforward. For example older studies from Soviet times showed higher heritability of IQ than conducted in Western studies (Elena L. Grigorenko Nova Publishers, 1997). One interpretation was that environmental conditions (in economic and schooling terms) under the Soviet regime were much more restricted and less varied than in the Western world at that time. Another issue is that in order to conduct a "proper" twin studies for this purpose, the twins would have had to be assigned to very random environments (spanning the variability found in a given test population). This is usually not the case. But the issue is actually far more complex, which I shall discuss in a follow-up post (and adding references) once I find more time and if there is interest.

Clinical cytogenetics is an approach, not a career or job per se. In that area there are different type of jobs ranging from technical personnel to the people running a diagnostic lab. One could work within health care providing units as well as independent contractor labs. Your responsibilities would vary depending on position as well as type of the lab. E.g. as a technician/analyst your responsibilities would be more on doing the analyses and maybe training junior staff as well as providing reports for supervisors or other health professionals. Patient interactions is usually absent. For that type of work usually at least a BSc and subsequent certification training is required (details will vary between countries). For most other positions in that area a MD/PhD is required.

The premise is wrong. There are no weak or strong genes and survival has only a secondary relevance. There are only variants that are a) beneficial, b) neutral or c) detrimental for reproduction under a given set of conditions. The latter can and does change and thus altering the selective pressure that shape genotypes. And on top of the whole thing there are stochastic events that also affect the genomic landscape though not in a structured manner.

I am just wondering Is ethanol a significant source of contamination?

Per definitionem all third world countries were not aligned with communism. I have not heard that they all of them were automatically more free and prosperous. One might think that there are more things going on.

A lot of things to go through I will address some merely off the top of my head but would have read up for some more details myself. As a general preamble I would like to mention that the field of artificial organs is still developing and there are wildly different approaches and rates of success. Since I am no specialist I can only cover a tiny segment and mostly from a biological perspective. 1) Scaffolds have different requirements for different types of tissue or organs. However, one approach is to use (micro)fabrication method to get a scaffold with biocompatible plastics and let cells differentiate on them. Depending on the complexity it can be a fairly straighforward mould or it may require precision lithographic methods. 2) I do not know the precise way they created the trachea but I assume that they essentially coated a scaffold with stem cells from the child (I could be wrong though). For example you could take a donor trachea, strip it of living cells and then replace with other cells.Another approach was to create a plastic scaffold and seed it. The whole system would be like a biocompatible tube, but it would not grow with the rest of the body (complex signaling processes would be needed in while the cartilage is built and I do not think anyone has been able to replicate that, much less control it). 3) Trachea are very simple, essentially flexible tubes. A bladder is basically an inflatable balloon Most organs have to carry out complex functions that require muscle movement, complex liquid (blood) control, filtering processes etc in a highly coordinate matter. The issue is less the 3D , but the functional part. 4) AFAIK the basic idea is to use stem cells as seed. But again, this approach is still in its infancy 5) AFAIK no complex artificial organs have been successfully produced using the receptor's cells. Current artificial implants are usually prosthetic devices so we do not really know how a complex cell based artificial organ would perform over time. While the development is ongoing and interesting, it is clearly not on the level that we can just create an organ in the lab just yet.

Is it the ideology or the authoritarian dictatorship? If we talk about casualties relative to the world population (a fair measure if we want to look back into history) we could for instance look at the famous An Lushan rebellion (uprising against the Tang dynasty in China. During the course of about 10 years somewhere up to 30 million people died (lowest estimates are around 10-15 million) which amounts up to 15% of the total world population at that time. Or the takeover of the Ming dynasty by the Qing with over 25 million deaths (ca. 5% of world population, though it admittedly took something like 50 years). And these are only examples from wars in China (as I happen to have books within reach). I think you underestimate the abilities of human to decimate each other regardless of philosophy, religion, ideology or economic system.