CharonY

And even if years down the road someone figures out that something is not quite correct at some point, many of his findings have been put to good use in the last (and I am sure also the coming) decades. It would be like calling out Alexander Fleming an idiot because he initially did not think that penicillin would work in vivo and because he was unable to purify it in sufficient amounts. Considering the amount of lives being saved I would gladly be such an idiot.

The temp differences could be a reason. Most manufacturers provide minimum lifetimes under shelf conditions and in reality it a bit worse. But did I understand correctly that it only survived 18 months? I do not know that logger, but according to the specs it should be around for 6-8 years? I would call the manufacturer to troubleshoot the issue, they know their product best and may actually have some ideas how to improve lifetime.

You are reading the paper wrong. I will get into the retraction part later, as that is contentious. However the overall data is inconclusive on basically all counts. Cancer is one aspect, but small sample size is an issue that goes for everything. The result was that the study design would not allow for finding any differences (including mortality as well as kidney issues). Among the many flaws was the aspect that the control rats they used had an usually high mortality rate, which makes them unsuitable for long-term studies. OECD guidelines state that for two-year experiments 50% survival is the minimum after 104 weeks (and at least 50 animals per sex group, which also was not the case). This would be the case with many rat lines, but the one they used only had 30% survival rate of male rats and less than 50% for females after that time. That alone invalidates any finding of long-term effects. Other more suitable rat lines would exhibit well above 70% survival rate. In addition, there are odd statistical test designs (though quite possibly down to insufficient statistical knowledge rather than intent). Other researchers have redone tests on the same data and found no significance in the other indicators (such as mortality, kidney failure, maybe also hormone levels, but am unsure about that). While one may always suspect the hand of some lobby in these kind of public incidents, strong data is usually an excellent defense in the scientific community. However, if the data is weak to begin with there will be little support and, rightfully, a lot of criticism. Now with regards to retraction. Technically it is a flawed study, though often this is insufficient to force a retraction. Theoretically it should not have passed peer-review or possibly only presented with proper statistical analysis stating that the data is inconclusive and that more research is needed. In fact, the latter would have resulted in much less contention and one could even propose that there may be an effect if more are tested. Alas, the authors decided to go the high-risk, high-reward route. But obvious overselling is rarely taken kindly in the scientific community. Especially because it makes other researchers vulnerable to people like lobbyists and pundits. The retraction part does cause ripples in the tox community. While many researchers would disregard the study as valid, few would outright push for retraction because of flawed interpretation. By this standard quite a few more papers should have been retracted. I guess it is an unfortunate mix of PR gone wrong and possibly the wrong editorial decision due to that.

The precipitation mechanisms are slightly different, but results are similar. I.e. nitric acid will not specifically precipitate a particular protein. There is a variation of the SSA method that allows a colorimetric and thus more quantitative method. The reason why it is used for albumin (+globulin) testing is that normally that these two are the highest abundant proteins. However, if there are other proteins present in significant amount, they will interfere with the test. The methods are as such not terribly selective, other than that some protein species are more prone to precipitate than others. Generally, the SSA method is reported to be slightly more sensitive than Heller but otherwise yield very similar results (each are somewhat prone to a different set of interfering substances, such as e.g. certain antibiotics, and are sometimes used in tandem).

It is an unspecific test for proteins and based on the denaturation of proteins in presence of a sufficiently strong acid.

There is no best place per se. Rather you would look at research groups with interesting topics that fits your interests and try to get positions there.

Who are you calling professional??? Those are fighting words around here!

Honing my skills to confuse people. Also smoked beetle legs.

I would be hesitant to say plenty, as I would not state that for practically any science job, currently. I know a few people outside of academia that work in the broader area of wildlife assessment in Canada/USA they are quite split between provincial/state jobs and consulting companies. The latter pay quite well and are still recruiting (last thing I heard was up to 85k for someone with a master's degree, but with practical experience). Their job is often to provide data for wildlife and vegetation assessment to companies and ensure that companies can survive governmental audits. One thing that often pops are are also fisheries (if you have specialized in aquatic biology a bit). Again, these job are often not PhD level, but I tend to be surprised by the amount of jobs found to these more traditional biologists than in my line of work (where there is considerable competition from the chemistry/medical/pharmacological area, depending on the precise specialization). Of course there is also academia where you will have always at least one position in the area of zoology and animal phys or ecology that could be filled by such a person (depending on specialization, as wildlife biology is a bit broad). But getting tenure is always a bit of a tricky beast, regardless what you do. That may be the case though there is usually no discipline dedicated to that particular task. One of the things could be biodiversity research during which new species may be found accidentally, so to speak.

Interest in a topic will be the most important part. Imagining doing something at this early point is not terribly useful as you will likely have a very imprecise idea what a researcher will do in a day-to-day basis (especially as it will dependent strongly on what you are doing and where you are). If you are fascinated by a subject so much that you cannot stop thinking about it, you have decent starting point. But as others have said, you should read around and find that thing (even if you do not end up in the field).

I swear a lot and throw abuses at him. If he really annoys me, I put a cloth over the mirror and ignore him for the rest of the day.

Absolutely. As I mentioned, there is a fair chunk of research that tries to re-create aspects of animal physiology. For the vast majority it is done out of necessity. In addition to tox testing there are also other aspects where animals are sacrificed, e.g. to isolate antibodies or extract primary cell lines. One could argue that this not different to regular livestock use, though.

.... no.

This is one the things which make me dubious about claims of personalized medicine. In an actual medical setting you need rather easy decision making systems based on simple diagnostics (relatively speaking). However, the promise of more data also means that data analyses and subsequent diagnostics is going to be complicated. In bio, this is still a very ongoing and often unresolved problem. For practical medical approaches it will be even worse.

Also in that context I would like to add that incompetent use or blatant misuse of statistics and general data analysis (as the example provided above... eliminating outliers, anyone?) is leading to a huge amount of wasted time and effort. Often coupled with the attempt of post-mortem statistics (i.e. calling in the statistician after the fact). Often, biology students are badly underprepared in statistical analysis. But the worst I have seen are certainly in the medical field (sadly). There have been many (mostly unsuccessful) attempts to change curricula accordingly. But hopefully with a new generation of faculty it will be easier to implement in the future. Hopefully.

I kind of disagree. There are schools out there with a high reputation in ecological sciences. In this context wildlife bio is actually quite relevant. It will depend on the area, though. I suppose finding a job in a very urbanized country/state will be hard, but in areas which much higher agricultural/resource based economy things are different. Also according to e.g Hesa (Higher Education Statistics Agency) biology students had very good employment statistics. For example, 2009/10 (there are newer statistics available here), the employment rate for full-time first degrees in bio is 91.1%, which is higher than for comp science or engineering (84.7 and 87.7, respectively). And that despite the huge number of graduates (which is a bit of a problem in biology, as it usually has more graduates and hence, more competition than other natural sciences). It should be noted that these figures do not distinguish whether graduates are working in their respective fields. Nonetheless, in comparison it does not seem that it is anywhere near its way out. Also I think what swansont said: is a major point in this context. As such, I do not see any field really declining at all.

Well, if you use such unwieldy beasts then by all means, bellow on BTW, have you heard about the sony 50 MP 44x33 mm (medium format-ish) sensor? The new medium frame crop promises to be relatively cheap (below 10k).

Well, I have used bellows before for macro shoots, but quite frankly, I have not heard of anyone (outside medium format shooters) still using it for architecture. Tilt shifts are much more common for perspective control as they are much more convenient and are easier to focus with.

This is just silly. So many areas hit -22 F and lower and people still have to do choires outside. Sure, frostbite is an issue but suffocation? Trying to argue that point based on an anecdote is really, well, silly.

I am not certain as I usually aim to get pics that are similar to what the human eye may see. One can get a bit of color in by boosting vibrance and saturation. Though even then this pic looks vastly oversaturated and they may have done more to it.

There is little that you can do in terms of colour, the moon is pretty monochromatic as it is. But if you want it to have a brownish hue, shoot during moonrise to get a nice tint. However, getting contrast and resolution right is usually the important bit. To get more of the craters a moon lit from the side (i.e. not a full moon) will provide more depth. Also minimize camera vibrations with a good tripod (weigh down if there is wind), locking the mirror (to avoid slap) or use a mirrorless and use shutter release cable or timer. And of course use a good lens.

Considering that this discussion tends to repeat itself I would like to add this paper. Here, a finer analysis was done to differentiate between climate papers and articles specifically addressing agw. Here, the paper found a rejection rate based on abstracts of about 1.9% (given potential error rates, this is quite remarkable). Note that rejecting global warming can be a different subset than rejecting AGW (as the latter may allow for global warming).

I do not see much use for a tutorial-like thread as there are gazillions of tutorial websites/books/seminars out there. Also considering that there are not many photography enthusiasts here, I would think Q&A type discussions (e.g. moon photography) or similar would be best suited here.

Always shoot manual, metering does not work well under extreme conditions (unless you use live view to set it properly, in that case aperture mode is useful). Set your focus to infinite assuming it is well-calibrated. I generally stop down the aperture to the sweet spot of the lens (i.e. where you have maximum sharpness), The moon is quite bright so you can stop down quite a bit. Assuming you got a tripod you can further set iso (for digital) to base to minimize noise. After that it is a matter for finding the right exposure. Again, avoid overexposure. If you go aperture mode you may have choose the metering wisely (i.e. straight on the moon) and still adjust exposure manually. Often times you need to go faster than 1/60 at base iso to avoid overexposure. And again, do not autofocus. That often goes wrong, too. Back to bellows, there may be some uses for perspective control in specific architectural photos (though less in cityscapes) but I assume in many cases a tilt-shift is more useful (and common, to my knowledge) than bellows. The latter is eminently useful for macros, though.

If you do not know precisely on the plate, do not expose yourself to it.