CharonY

To further iNow's point, he decidedly rejected the notion of a personal god and considered himself mostly an agnostic.

Well, if we had one on this forum this thread would cause him/her to die from a raging hemorrhage.

Some companies do have grant-like system where several developer groups have to submit a proposal, but many are directly funded. In any case, this is generally applied research where they e.g. develop or improve their product lines. I would not think that they would would cut much out if they want to have a new product line to sell in the coming year(s). It should be stressed that the report is not about general research and science.

As I mentioned, that is patently not true. The regulations in most European countries with mixed models the regulations for the private insurers are stricter that in the US. And there are often also rules that inhibit switching so that people cannot game the public system. Only recently did the US have a minimum what has to be insured, for example, whereas that was always the norm in the European system (at least those that i have a passing knowledge of). Looking at balance one could say that in most (all?) European countries the decision power on health care is under governmental oversight. In the US the industry holds a significant amount of power. Private insurance is therefore more in private hands in the US than in the other countries.

Well, at the minimum you would need a nitrogen source and some other precursors are needed.

If that was supposed to mean that it somehow involves sex chromosomes, then no. PAI is on chromosome 7.

Actually, if one wants to look at fancy energetics, one should not look at animals or plants, but at bacteria instead. They pretty much figured everything out that is energetically possible. Now if you focus on respiration and use methane and hydrogen analogous to water and oxygen then it is clearly energetically impossible. You cannot get energy out of that the way you can from oxygen (essentially like willing a ball to rolll up a hill on its own). That being said, there are ways bacteria either produce or consume hydrogen or methane to survive. As mentioned, some are able to use hydrogen as electron donor (and then something else with a higher redox potential as acceptor). And as in the above example hydrogen production is used to regenerate reduced compounds (ferredoxins, NAD+) that are needed for substrate-level energy generation. For methane we have also something. Methanotrophes are also able to use methane as electron donor (and also carbon source) . Then we have methanogenesis. In these cases methane is emitted as a consequence of the final step of the electron transfer chain (i.e. analogous to the water production in oxygen respiration). In this case electrons are transferred generally to either acetate or CO2. As you can see, hydrogen and methane are only usable really at the front end of energy generation (i.e. electron donors) or are produced as a side aspect of respiration/fermentation processes. Both cannot be linked in a chain to yield energy. It is a bit like placing a ball on a flat surface and willing it to accelerate. However, with additional components it is possible to sustain life with these as core processes (as we have on Earth). Just the analogous use of hydrogen -> oxygen and methane ->water does not make much sense. Typed this in a hurry so it may not be easily understandable. Need coffee.

That is a bit tricky for high-school, I think. The essence is that the author present a summary of how the sound formation in crickets and grasshoppers is regulated on the neuronal level. In the summary special areas are mentioned that, when stimulated, results in the release of the song. It also mentions a regulatory circuit that reduces the propensity to chirp as response to its own song.

I am not sure what you mean with In the US health care is highly privatized. Do you mean to say that the US is the only one where the private aspects are under governmental oversight? In Canada the health care is almsot exclusively publicly funded. There are aspects that are also privately funded, but with strict regulations. Sweden is also mostly publicly funded. Private providers also exist, but are also strictly regulated (much more so than in the US I would assume).. I think the pity from Europeans is mostly due to the fact that there are US Americans that are not or under-insured.

The part in bold is simply wrong, again hydrogen is not an electron acceptor. Whoever wrote it clearly misunderstood the process of hydrogen use (as electron donor, i.e. pretty much on the opposite side of the role of oxygen). With regards to hydrogen production, as I mentioned, it is a byproduct of anaerobic energy generation. One way using substrate-level phosphorylation (i.e. a process to generate ATP that is independent of respiration). I am not an expert on the precise pathwys that hydrogenosomes take, but looking at the scheme it appears ferredoxins are being reduced (assuming that the graphic on wiki is correct). Then the transfer to H+ and generation of H2 is for the regeneration (i.e. re-oxidation) of ferredoxin and drives the production of acetyl-coA. The actual energy generation happens in a different step. Again, we have microbes producing hydrogen (often to regenerate e.g. NAD) or which utilize it as electron donor. Just not as the role that oxygen has (i.e. electron acceptor. The redoxpotential is simply on the wrong end of the spectrum.

Some neurons do proliferate. But beside that a nucleus is also needed for basic functions as proteins have to be produced continuously (i.e. the the assumption in OP is wrong), and a lot of regulatory functions act on the DNA level, etc. Only cells with very limited functions. especially with regards to the reaction to stimuli and are easy to replace could function without a nucleus.

I am afraid that this is not how genetics works. You have to introduce the DNA into the germline. Not the protein.

Actually hydrogenosomes produce hydrogen as a byproduct of energy generation. They do not actually respire it. Respiration involves the transfer of an electron from a donor (usually NADH) to an acceptor, such as O2, nitrate, fumarate, Fe3+ to name a few examples. The redox potential between donor and acceptor drives the process, which in turn powers the transporters involved in creating a membrane potential necessary for ATP generation. As such hydrogen can be an electron donor in some organisms, but not an acceptor.

The proteins will get lost pretty fast. The only way to do it is create stable transferctions. I.e. have the organisms produce the protein. Injection the protein into them is not going to achieve that. In addition RFPs (there are quite some different flavors around) have excitation maxima around 550-600, which is well in the visible spectrum (i.e. UV would not do much). Finally the quantum efficiency is mostly bad, so you need quite a strong light source. I.e. there would not be much of a beautiful glow in the dark...

I do not think that the molecular basis are actually known and hence, the study of the evolutionary background would be a bit premature.

From my point of view abiogenesis per se is not a fundable and as such oftentimes information that may illuminate our knowledge gaps tend to be byproducts of other research. I think it got a bit of a boost recently with research in the area of synthetic biology and protein evolution together with improved structure analysis tools at our hands. I would be kind of surprised if there were a lot of specialists claiming that we know a lot (or anything) about abiogenesis. But I guess it depends on the specific (sub-)discipline one gets into contact with.

The death of an 83 year old adjunct professor has sparked a discussion on the position of adjuncts in academia. Traditionally adjunct positions are offered as means to associate oneself with a given department without being a full faculty member and it generally (but not always) involves some teaching duties. Now why is this a matter of contention? And: While I am not in favor of her tragic fate being politicized, it does show an ugly underbelly of academia. Due to budget cuts many universities have or had hiring freezes and instead opted to hire adjuncts instead of lecturers (with full benefits) or tenure-track faculty. At the same time, tuition rates and fees increase. There are certain elements to this story that make it so delectable for media (she was battling cancer and virtually homeless, though got intermediate housing on campus for a while), but I would like to focus on the broader discussion about what you think is important in higher education and the role of adjuncts. Universities in most countries have become a business of sorts. The administration (as important as their role is) seek to increase revenue by creating position that make them more attractive to students and to increase student success (including dorms, outreach officers, advisers, recruiters, public relations etc.). To many, this is a clever business model. Coming from the other side the expansion of administration and administrative services while keeping faculties at roughly the same size in most universities and using adjuncts instead is quite troubling and may endanger the core mission of universities (i.e. providing higher education and research), not to mention the exploitation of highly qualified personnel. What are your thoughts on the matter?

I do. But I presume it is because you actually agree with me. If you do not, I disagree. Also I love random scatter plots through which I can draw arbitrary lines.

The description is not clear to me. What does the 10, 14, 23 mm refer to? The inhibition zone? Or do you mean that 2mm is the zone of inhibition, how does it look for 1? What do the number in brackets refer to? Also I do know what you mean with chosing? The goal is to establish which ABs they are sensitive to, no?

That has been under discussion on and off and certain EM people do not like the idea of artifacts within biological samples (although they are copious). In more recent times (sometime after 2005, I believe) people have more accepted that mesosomes are not pure artifacts per se, but rather a physical manifestation of certain damages to membranes, which can happen under a variety of conditions. So on EM they are the result of artifacts, but these ultrastructural changes also happen in vivo (though often accompanied by cell death), but are certainly not organelles as created by the organism. It was not that big of a contention for microbiologists anyway and biochemist tend to lag behind these areas for a few years. Considering the significance (or lack thereof), the time frame and the scope of the book it appears that they just missed it.

This is quite an important point. But how about (more or less speculative) treatments that are not aimed at treating cancer, but improve its management and life quality until it overwhelms the system? One issue with cancer treatments is that while they may prolong the life of the patient to some extent, they are also very destructive of the body and can be even more painful than cancer itself (depending on a lot of parameters, of course). In other words, the treatment does not automatically improve life quality, aggressive chemos do quite the reverse in fact. In that context would better management be preferable over treatment? Edit: I should add that one could and probably split it further up as it will of course be highly dependent on the type of cancer and at which age it has been acquired. But for discussion's sake I will keep it as general as OP.

You... do not know the practical reason of time zones (which, ironically is based on an agreement of sorts, not disagreement)...? And hundreds of them? Seriously?

Precisely. Without a proper context there is no room for a discussion. It may as well be a poll then.

Actually other countries such as USA and Canada are basically in the same boat (especially with the sequestration in the US and the type of government in CA), from what I can see. So the good news is that Australia is not going to lag too much behind....

Just to add, the reason why basic research are being slashed is the perception that it does not generate immediate benefits. This is the reason why the huge majority of basic research is conducted with government funds, rather than with private money. Now, there is a push from politics for science to generate short-term benefits, in a similar way of thinking as companies. This would absolutely kill basic research and there will be whole swaths of nature that we will not be able to explore (no company would touch that). With regards to the human genome project, it was an aberration for various reason not really a matter of private vs public. The main reason they were faster and cheaper was the shotgun strategy they used. This technique has issues with assembling the sequences if you do not have a good scaffold to align it to. However, HUGO offered a well-ordered scaffold (they made a much more labor intensive top-down approach that is slower, but has a better way to order the sequences) and made continuous releases public, which Celera could use to make sense out of their shotgun sequences. On top of that Celera sought to patent genes based on the draft, which was the main reason why they were able to raise the funds. Here the monetary reward is quite clear (and the stocks plummeted after the push to prevent patenting human genes). Thus for most basic research Arete's question would be the key point.