CharonY

First of all, I would go to every job interview, provided they are not connected to high expenses. If nothing else, it will give you interview experience. You can still decline the job should they choose you. With regards to working in HE, the issue is that you will be looking at a faculty position and that is quite tricky. The success rate has been dropping more or less constantly and especially positions in research unis are hard to get. I am also not sure if a MSc will benefit you a lot. If you have already worked as technician your current degree may be sufficient if you want to get a technician/analyst. For now, you are looking at a PhD position, but you should also expand your view beyond that and find alternatives to faculty jobs. You will have to look at the timeline, PhD will take you about 5 years I believe (I am not too familiar with the UK system) followed in the area of molecular bio with a postdoc for minimum of four, and upwards to 8 years . After that some may encourage you to find a different job. The chances of a faculty level position are around 10% by now, and there are very few permanent positions in academia that are research related. My suggestion is the following: draw out a complete paths to potential careers, including private sector jobs. Build a timeline to see how long these steps take and check whether a few years of teaching would delay things by very much. I would urge you not to focus exclusively on a tenure position as the sole career choice because getting one of those almost boils down to a matter of luck. Another thing, if you do not get into one of the top research unis, many teaching unis still allow for some research. Having teaching experience can help you get a job in one of those. However, teaching is not seen as a plus in the private sector (usually).

Indeed. Or anything else but a passing grade in one of the entry-level courses. What is weird to me is that some people string together some facts and factoid and believe they actually have discovered something. Reminds me of kindergarten or elementary school days when kids mix two colors and are fascinated by the "invention" of a new one (that conveniently already has a name). Well, the latter is kind of cute, though.

Eh, one would not send that to reviewers, it would reflect poorly.

If this was a scientific journal we would not have this discussion at all.

Hm theoretically I would assume that ethanolamine could work as electron donor in E. coli by converting acetaldehyde to acetate. With regards to electron acceptors, E. coli does favor them in order of ATP generation. As in basically all facultatives nitrate respiration is next in line. Lower yield acceptors include DMSO and fumarate, but then you have C4 body in there that may interfere with whatever experiment you are interested in.

I think that the issue is not of imbalance but that we may discourage a significant proportion of the population to acquire skills and knowledge in natural sciences (or in bio let them start with wrong preconceptions). We may therefore reduce scientific literacy within the population.

I cannot really see much in the image and without detailed settings with regards to type of microscope, filter sets etc. it will just be speculation. However, is there stray light or was bright field illumination on?

Eh, we should just introduce newspeak and arrest everyone engaged in crime- and doublethink according to some random speech recognition system. Then only release them once they engage fully in goodthink. I cannot see how that could possibly go wrong.

I do not think that the answer depends a lot on context. In short term the answer is obviously yes. If we could not sustain the population it would drop. The issue tend to be long-term projection and the amount of ecological damage and human suffering we want to put up with. Current data suggest that birth rates are declining or leveling out, and due to fill up we are likely to end up with stable population of 10 billion. If resources are insufficient for that, the resulting deaths will level that amount. The big question is then the ecological consequences of such a population, and how improved resource use (e.g. alternative energy uses) can mitigate issues. But overall, it has clearly been shown that education and empowering women had a tremendous effect on controlling population growth (as evidenced by reduced birth rates). In that regard, we do have a kind of population control.

I think the video is a bad foundation for this discussion considering that the inteview seems like a second-hand rehash of an actual study. The study in question being this here. I have posted a rebuttal (in a blog) earlier in this thread. he mix. The parts relating to immune systems in the paper are only speculative (i.e. more an impact point rather than something actually being investigated) and the reasoning is that radiation could further worsen issues in people who are already immune-comprised. But again, the study is purely looking at death rates and not at mechanisms of any kind.

Well, the number is based on a published article, albeit in a journal with a really low impact factor. That said the study was done shoddily. I should also add that it is not a medical journal but more health service related. It may be one of the reasons why there was less scrutiny during peer-review.

Uh what? Dissolve the parliament and invest a chancellor with unlimited emergency powers?

On top of my list would be and searching for their towels.

I will just leave this here.

I do not understand what you are trying to propose. Could you provide context and explain what you mean a bit more?

Actually I I would like to add some points with regards to meetings. To me it is not so much a matter of size, but rather one of organization. If you prefer 1-on-1 and you have the time to do so, go ahead, but I would give them a schedule as opposed to surprise meetings. That way the person can organize his/her thoughts/project/data and no one is singled out by chance or intent. I agree that large meetings are useless, that is why I mentioned project meetings. To give a practical example: in one of my postdocs our group consisted of about 20 people, divided in about six projects. In addition, the topic of a meeting were deliberately limited so that no more than 3-4 people plus boss were involved in each. For instance the topic of a meeting could be finalization of a manuscript and only those involved in writing the draft (as opposed to the larger project group) would attend. he large meetings were reserved to issues like need for lab=ware or other general interest issues and were generally kept to about 20 mins each Monday morning. The disadvantage was that the boss and certain key personnel still had a larger meeting load, but overall I found them more productive than huge big table meetings.

On the employee side (and again, academic setting), I work best when I am left alone as I am usually pretty good at identifying issues. I compile them and go to the boss to discuss them. It works for me better as I need to compile the issues in a streamlined way before I can discuss solutions efficiently. I have worked with a boss once who would walk into my office on a regular basis (or when he was bored) and ask for updates, which I would give him, but I never felt that in these interactions anything worthwhile was accomplished for the project. Instead the main purpose appears to be to provide the boss with positive feelings about progress. To me, these were more disruptive than anything else. If one has the need to keep in touch outside of meetings, coffee and lunch breaks tend to work (depending on group structure, obviously). If anyone brings something up it is a great pressure-free situation to discuss matters, if not, one could assume things are going well until the next meeting.

I would say this is indeed the case. There also has been a discussion how much gender stereotyping in childhood may influence it (e.g. the being afraid of maths part).

Excellent and concise post.

You can be arrogant all alone. But if you do not interact (including body language) with anyone, no one would know. But as others mentioned, I do not see how one relates to the other. You can be an arrogant idiot or a humble genius. Some may argue that the former is far more prevalent.

Funny, form my experience (in a science setting) the way I approach the situation often determined the outcome. I would also hazard that the dynamics of the interactions will be the determining factor.

Think in these terms: - you have the info of two strands. Can one be used to figure out the sequence of the other? - If you have the complete sequence, how would you translate it into the amino acid sequence? - In order to re-assemble something from fragments, what do you need to know the order that they appear?

While I agree that people should choose what they have interest in, I wonder about the "naturally inclined" part. Why would a preference to a specific natural science be "natural"? There is certainly perception involved but I would think this has societal rather than natural causes.

In the article it was noted that apes are bad at learning the meaning of pointing, however other research contradict this notion. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2151757/

I would be careful to invoke the natural progression of things to this matter. The fertilized egg develops into a complete organism if thousands of things do not go wrong. Fertilized eggs can be aborted before the mother actually knows that she is pregnant. Of course that rate is not known but estimated to be around 30-50%. The reasoning behind this is that miscarriage rate with known pregnancies is still 15-30%. With a progressive drop over time. In other words, if we talk about natural reaction, we have to figure in that it only happens slightly more than 50% of the time. Note that biology does not care about our definitions, it is a bunch of progressive, somewhat stochastic processes we are talking about. Not a straight line from A to B and there are no clear delineations. As such the (somewhat arbitrary) definitions exclusively make sense in the context of the discussion e.g. policy, ethics or teaching. What we cannot do is to invoke biological laws to create the context for us. The only straight biological answer we can provide is that every freaking cell is alive. And that is quite silly to base policies on. And even that is not quite clear as there is no clear-cut definition for life, either. There are entities that have certain functions and we decide, based on one property or another that a group is alive and a other is not (e.g. viruses vs cells). Yet nature does not do these distinctions.