CharonY

If memory serves it is a siderophore? In that case you could consider a simple CAS (chrome azurol S) assay. Provided as John mentioned that you do not have too much in terms of interfering substances.

On the high school level I would say that it does not make a terrible much of a difference as the material will only be taught in a relatively superficial level. I would probably chose the teacher who is more knowledgeable and interest in the topic he/she teaches.

Are you aware of the difference between climate and weather?

Without cooking, agar pretty much ends up as precipitate. One could try to split suspensions (after vigorous stirring) , and with complex medium it tends not to be that critical. I have never tried to freeze medium though, now that I think about it (fridge would not last long for rich media, though).

All evidence point to yes. For some perspective according to wiki the CO2 emission per capita 2012 is 7.1k tons for China, 1.6 (!) for India and 16.4 for the US. There is still some catching up to do for those large countries.

Could work for a certain time, though re-heating agar changes its qualities slightly (especially with very cheap agar pouring plates with re-heated medium can be a bit iffy). Again, for routine cultivation it would work for some time, do not expect quantitative reproducibility.

Very very odd advice in this thread. One major thing to do to increase mental capacity is reading. You want to remember something? Get interested in it. Increase oral skills? Join a debate club or just talk with someone about advanced topics. Studies on students taking a variety of drugs that are supposed to help them focus have shown little to no benefits in terms of test scores. Another thing to note is that the ability to cram (memorize) facts will help you through exams, but believe me, they are not that relevant as you may think they are. If you want to study physics. get into physics text books. If you have genuine interest and devote time to it in trying to understand some fundamentals (rather than memorizing them) you will have a leg up over easily 80% of your fellow students.

Depends on when you intend to use the rest. The dishes could get contaminated over time or simply dry out, so you cannot store them indefinitely. If you want to measure it out you have to ensure that the powder is well mixed, which is a bit tricky. For routine cultivation that should not be that big of an issue, but if you want to perform quantitative assays, I would rather use everything.

Among microbiologists there is a joke with regards to antibacterial soaps. How do you call cheap antibacterial soap? -Soap. Really, just washing hands (regardless of types of soap) has shown great benefits, but in many hospitals adherence to hygiene protocols are lax. In private households the overuse of Among alternatives to antibiotics it appears that phage therapy, with all its issues appears to be furthest in actual use. Other alternatives (such as sortase inhibitors) are currently of unknown therapeutic value.

Depends a lot on the type of presentation under consideration. For that matter, providing context is always a good start.

If you read the abstract (if you cannot access the full article) it appears that there is quite a variance in how they do it, which indicates a somewhat learned behavior. At least one of them appears to have figured out that it only really works during nest building season (thus reinforcing the lure aspect over potential camouflage).

Well, bottom line is that the use of metabolite creation in organisms only works well if the compound of interest is a protein, that is not modified much and can be produced and extracted effectively from the host. Alternatively, the metabolite is already present in the organism or only requires minute modification to regular (usually secondary) metabolism without disrupting too much. While the technical steps are well understood, finding the right targets is a matter of much ongoing research (i.e. the time investment to figure out whether it works at all is quite substantial, much less the actual realization). Setting up this kind of research requires significant amount of funding, too. And by now most companies (after an initial hype roughly in the late 90s) have shied away from these programs (with very few exceptions that already have sunk a lot of money) or have outsourced it to unis. Also as I alluded in my first post, chances are you mean organic compounds....

It is not quite that trivial. The uptake of amino acids in form of digested proteins (i.e. peptides) can differ quite from pure amino acids. We have essentially evolved to utilize proteins as a nutrient but are not quite as well in utilizing pure amino acids (some metabolic studies showed differences in utilization of different protein sources and amino acid supplements). On top of that (and note that I am no expert on it) it appears that the regulation of protein/amino acid uptake and metabolism can be somewhat dependent on the way it is taken up, but I do not know whether there are detrimental effects. Overall there has been various attempts (usually from the industrial sector) to break down food into its constituents and rebuild it to create artificial food or nutrient supplements (baby food is an obvious example). The issue is that rarely it provides benefits over regular healthy diets. In cases were essential components were missed (e.g. lack of taurine in baby food) or when pure components were utilized differently the results could be detrimental. With regards to risks, it is not clear whether protein intake is a higher risk factor than anything else we eat. From a clinical viewpoint carbohydrate are properly the highest risk, considering the diseases and issues associated with it. Food allergies appear to be rising, but that is obviously not due to dietary reasons (i.e. if it was our food, we would expect it to be fairly constant).

This is the picture from the paper. They use it as a lure (nesting material) and not as camouflage (they are rather log-like while drifting, anyway).

I fail to see how it is an advantage or categorize societies into different groups and assign them positions within those. Why should background matter? Should you not become a carpenter if you enjoy the work but come from a white-collar family? Shouldn't education not enrich everyone's life regardless of actually applicability to a certain career? Should we not provide children the opportunity to succeed in whatever they want to achieve regardless of where they come from? And doesn't require to teach them the opportunities that exist? I think there is a strong romanticized view of the "impoverished" working class present in the post that is a bit remote from reality. Certain working class jobs have a better salary than academics for example (certainly so early in the career), so I do not think that income is a big issue here. The background of a person forms his/her history but should not determine his/her future.

Potato

In your description you are missing oogenesis. The primary oocyte is diploid, but then matures into the haploid ovum (via secondary oocyte).

These assays are useful and I know of a number of approaches that try to automate this. For the clinical settings a number of aspects are relevant. It requires to have a readout that is easy to interpret for non-microbiologists, it has to be accurate and reproducible and the workflow must be fairly straightforward with little room for mistakes. Usually the new approaches tend to be a bit rough on the last part. Fundamentally there is the issue that during an infection smears can have a mix of bacteria with different resistance profiles, therefore the workflow ideally should also answer what bacteria there are so that the most pathogenic ones can be targeted first (though usually abundance itself is also a fair indicator).

As the title says, a paper just came out in which the use of lures by alligators has been reported. V. Dinets, J.C. Brueggen & J.D. Brueggen , Ethology Ecology & Evolution (2013): Crocodilians use tools for hunting, Ethology Ecology & Evolution, DOI: 10.1080/03949370.2013.858276 The abstract: In a photo within the article an alligator was balancing sticks and similar nestbuilding materials on its head. Now they need to learn how to use beer as a lure...

No, Tm is length dependent . The more nucleotides are involved, the more energy is needed. The way to look at it is that it is a stochastic process and with increasing temperature the likelihood of a bond being dissolved (or formed) increases (decreases). However, for more bonds (i.e. bases) you need more successive events. It gets a bit more complicated due to the fact that neighboring interactions factor in as well. I.e. if a bond is present it stabilizes the neighboring bond.

That is not enough information as it would depend on the type of gel electrophoresis being conducted. Since we also do not provide direct answers it would be ideal if you provided some more context and tell us about your initial thoughts.

It is necessarily so, as biological entities are highly complex and so are their properties. A simple description for complex properties are necessarily imprecise. The terms life and death are superficially precise, but if looked deeper into that it is clear that they are not (again, because it is used as a description for biological, complex entities). This does actually go further as the way we describe things so that we can understand them is obviously highly context dependent (see Arete's example). I used the term "fail" to describe cell death, but of course in the context of programmed cell death it is not a failure, but precisely the way things work so that an organism can live (whereas the cell dies). In truth, biological processes are are just highly physical processes, and we give them specific terms in order to better describe them within specific contexts. I should stress: the terminology is only vague if you try to apply them in an universal context. Within certain research areas the terms are usually used in a very precise manner. Apoptosis for example is a highly structured form of cell death. Other or similar parameters can be used depending on whether you are looking at cells from a cytotoxicity, developmental or cell physiological viewpoint.

Generally one would consider a cell dead once integrity has been compromised to an extent that it cannot resume regular cellular functions. There is usually not a single element but a strong indicator is membrane integrity. If that fails, energy generation stops and there is no real way to recover from there. But there are usually many factors that may lead to this, including complex apoptosis programs that result in a controlled cell death. Again, there is no singular magic spark that determines whether a cell is alive or not, but many elements that fail, sometimes in a coordinated manner.

I have to agree with Ophiolite. Nonewithstanding any intentions may may have had, life in itself is a tricky and somewhat arbitrary concept. That does not in any way invalidate concepts of evolution or any approaches one may have developed towards understanding abiogenesis (quite the opposite I may argue). As I has been pointed out by Ophiolite, me and many others the definition of live is a concept that we created for practical purposes but does not necessarily reflect reality on all complexity levels. For example, with a very simplified view you could argue that cells perform homeostatic actions, and to some extent they do. For many approaches it is useful to assume a certain type of steady-state, too. But obviously things change almost on a constant basis if looked closely enough (just think in terms of cell cycles etc.). One should get used to the fact that certain definitions are matters of convenience to be able to frame specific questions. Edit: Cross-posted with Arete, but he provided a beautiful example why the definitions are in flux. To give a counter-view, coming from a more systems-oriented view that does not specialize on evolutionary processesI would consider viruses more to be mobile genetic elements with no distinct metabolic activities. Both views are valid for the respective questions being investigated.

That is true. Practical courses are much more rigorously structured. Most are not geared or useful for data generation, though. From the OP I had the impression that it was a bit more like volunteer work or undergrad research. I could be wrong, of course.