CharonY

I think we can summarize that most agree on willful ignorance rather than mere ignorance, lack of education or intelligence are annoying. I would be careful to try to assign any kind of evolutionary reason to it, as this attitude is far from universal and easily changes over time and on the situation you are in. For instance, one may realize that willful ignorance in some cases is simply based on lack of interest on a certain topic ("how dare you confuse Star Wars with Star Trek"- yeah it's borderline, I know). In many cases one does learn simply to walk away unaffected (maybe with a hint of sadness in certain cases).

IIRC you basically every time you go into REM sleep. However, you often do not remember it after a relatively short time. If you do wake up shortly after a dream and think about it, then you can often recall it. There are also non-REM dreams but I am not sure about their frequency.

The relationship can be very thin, and still acceptable, especially in experimental areas. For example, if you are familiar with certain techniques but apply it to a different system, or conversely, same system but different research area. Especially skills in the molecular biological field are easily transferable. The better question is whether you are competitive with your peers as a whole. As a rule of thumb, familiarity with techniques tends to give you an upper hand, as it usually means that they have to invest less time to train you. And time is usually the most valuable resource.

That certainly does not belong into microbiology.

If we rephrase it to mean why are we annoyed by people that are willfully ignorant as opposed to lacking in mental ability (two different things in my mind, as mentioned above) then I would say there are several reasons. The most prominent one is probably that by not agreeing with ones opinion, they deny the validation that one may seek. Hence the frustration. Personally I am not affected by that too much except in situations. The first is if it is my role to educate someone and I am faced with willful ignorance. Here, the annoyance is based on the feeling of wasted time that I really could have invested elsewhere. The second is when willful ignorance results in disruptive procedures or protocols. But essentially both are more in the professional area.

You are absolutely correct, in my mind I was already a few steps further.

It is weird, I cannot recall the last time I felt talking to someone with inferior intelligence. What I find infuriating is people (even highly intelligent ones) that do not make an effort to understand things or at least improve their understanding. Of course there are people with different/lower education and different viewpoints, but as long as both sides are making an effort to communicate efficiently I feel it is a lot of fun and hardly frustrating at all. I would state that willful ignorance and arrogance are the two major elements that irritates me more than intelligence or education. That and if people do not immediately recognize how great I am. Of course, it is also possible that I am the inferior person and that is why I do not meet too many fitting the description.

I believe what you have read has involved liquid nitrogen http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/birthday-cocktail-proves-deadly-18-year-old-article-1.1177421 Most likely badly processed. But for food that has been prepared with traditional means I would agree with the posters that damages would be mostly to mouth and esophagus. I.e. for something that is sufficiently hot to damage the stomach, it would also be damaging to mouth and esophagus.

Considering that this is the internet, I am pretty certain that the worst possible explanation is the correct cone. Wife making a soup (at least the usual way) is not horrible enough.

It is more a charade-type of game rather than riddle (except you are guessing a plot rather than a word).

There is something to it with respect to the naked mole rat, but it is outside of my expertise. However it does not appear to be a simple genetic connection. Instead, unusual hyaluronans appear to be related to their resistance to cancer (see Tian et al. 2013 Nature doi:10.1038/nature12234). Also note that the genes implicated in cancer are part of the normal genetic system of the organism. If a genetic link is assumed, the absence of genetic element could as likely reduce cancer risk as the presence of one.

You use conserved regions that are not specific to a specific species. You can easily find them with a quick lit search.

PCR using appropriate primer for fungal species.

For identification you do not sequence the genome, just diagnostic stretches. Typically rRNA genes are amplified and sequenced. Note that normally sequencing is not done on the chromosome either. Depending on system one would use sequencing vectors or add linkers to the fragments to be sequenced, for example. For these elements you would use standard sequencing primers.

I am not sure how that goes with corruption, but assuming you mean ethical issues in a broader sense it is more a matter of which time frames you are looking at. Today's situation does not look that unique if you compare it to, say, mass internment of US-citizens of Japanese descent during WWII, human experimentation on Guatemalans in the 40s, McCarthyism, the eugenics movement which basically only stopped sometime during WWII, etc. With regards to warrantless wiretaps: and http://airccse.org/journal/ijmit/papers/1110ijmit03.pdf One could and should argue the scale, but that there are technological reasons for that. I.e. it simply was not that easy in former times. I would argue that the ethical landscape has not shifted that much but there may have been at least two major changes. One is the rise of very powerful conglomerates (though Eisenhower already warned about the "mitlitary-industrial complex" and potentially anti-corruption laws. If something that was illegal is somehow legal now, there must have been changes in regulation at some point. Also there may be a survivor bias. Maybe people just did not get caught or were reported on that often in former times?

I believe we are talking about different points. My initial assumption (without data) was that most governments will exhibit corruption due to interconnections between elements of power. I believe your argument appears to be that a) it was not the case in the US until recently (for which I have not seen any data to substantiate) and b) that other countries do much better. I provided the link using the only metric that I could find that at least based on ranking there does not appear to be something fundamentally different between the US and other Western countries with similar forms of government. I think your arguments do not touch these points at all but are rather a rally to change the current situation (with a hint that it used to be better). To be fair, both of us have moved quite a bit off-topic so it would be fine to end the discussion at that point. Though it does intrigue me whether corruption has indeed risen significantly over the years and whether the Reagan years were indeed turning point of sorts. Why I like to go back to data and values is that anecdotes are good for opinion pieces, but do not necessarily reflect reality. One striking element that I could find that could back it up is that there appears to be a significant increase in revolving door issues (e.g. policy-makers becoming lobbyists, lobbyists serving as congressional staff members etc.). It should be noted that the EU is riddled with the very same issues. One interesting point would be to see whether that is really a novel development and where the roots are. For instance, have there been changes in regulations that would prohibited it earlier?

But doesn't that lead back to the issue of how to quantify corruption? I.e. how much is perception and how is really quantifiable? The closest thing I could find is the corruption perceptions index, in which the US is ranked 19, which is close to the UK and Japan (17) but higher than France (22). If we used that values it is not that outlandishly different, but unfortunately the data collection only started 1996 http://www.transparency.org/cpi2012/results. It is certainly true that Canada (and Australia, as well as many Nordic countries) are ranked higher, but then it goes again to the question how much is the difference, really?

Was it an individual banana or a bunch? I also wanted to point out that according to OP the taste was not off, just apparently not the ripeness as expected. Also, was it exposed to sunlight and at which temperature? Also was the banana still green when bought? Most bananas are usually ripened past that point, i.e. they are sold while still firm, but should not have a strong raw taste to them. In ripening chambers the process takes about a week (from green to early ripeness). However, there the bananas are stacked in close proximity and exposed to defined doses of ethylene. Keeping them individually and unconfined will delay the ripening process (as they emit ethylene themselves). Obviously, if you really are interested, you would have to conduct some more experiments and monitor the results more closely as categories such as "too firm" are usually not terribly helpful.

I am also unaware of chemicals with that properties. Only recently a coating was proposed that would delay rotting, but the standard way is to increase/restrict access to ethylene. But from your description your taste changes only in ripeness and is not indicative of the use of some mystery chemicals. There are several ways to increase or slow the ripening process, e.g. sealing them in a bag, add pear or apple etc, so the ripening time will be also dependent on the way you store them. To me, 9 days starting from a green banana does not sound terribly odd.

Is it possible that you got plantains?

While we are discussing that in terms of US government, I am pretty sure that pretty much the same is true for basically all governments. Strong networks are the basis of power, but also of corruption.

These are pretty much my feelings, too. Things like blatant lies and hypocrisy are relatively easy to spot, but corruption is quite a different matter. Moreover, I suspect the entanglement between influential groups and politics is so tight that many things that one may perceive as corrupt are commonplace and in fact part of the normal policy-making process. When comes to this I would also assume that the depth of entanglement does likely correlate with political influence rather than party, as one is dependent on the other to a large extent.

I am wondering, is there any metric that would quantify that? Maybe in terms of donations volumes, for example.

Hm, I kind of missed that it is about non-rhizobial diazotrophic bacteria. That is slightly somewhat less exciting as to my (potentially outdated) knowledge the fixation rate is far lower (probably due to more limited nutrient exchange and unfavorable pO2 levels). I remember faintly that there was quite a discussion whether some of the observed yield increase were really due to nitrogen fixation or an enhanced ability to take up nutrients from soil in presence of bacteria. In any case the results were significant, but the effect size was not huge, especially compared to rhizobia. Getting these endophytes in a way that they immediately colonize the plant is probably a clever thing as they tend to get outcompeted so easily from root surfaces and soil, but I assume there will still be quite a significant need of other forms of fertilization. I would be somewhat surprised if the reduction in fertilizer would be huge.

I think most parents to some degree accept the fact that their kids are going to live their own life at some point. Being a parent is and should be a bit selfless. As a parent you get to create and form a person and that itself could pretty much be reward enough (and you are passing on your genes, if you are into that....) If you only have a child to for your entertainment, you are probably better off with a pet. Also, I think a relationship in which someone cares more about his/her parents than his/her own family is not necessarily very healthy. Priorities pass on from one generation to the next and I think this is something that most parents understand well.