CharonY

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.

As already mentioned, the main criticism of OP is that it lacks specificity as well as novelty. The use of bioagents for cancer control has been under investigation for well over a decade or so. OP does neglect all the issues with using them in a clinical setting as well as their general limitations (e.g. that it only works, if at all on certain types of solid tumors). In research throwing ideas around is really the cheap part. Over a coffee you will easily collect a few dozens of them. It only gets interesting if you manage to identify challenges and strategies to overcome them. And no, declaring that there will be something without any specifics is not worth a damn.

Companies may be a bit different as the workers there seem to view themselves less in a training situation as compared to academia. In these situations the most common strategy I have heard is to request updates or have project meetings rather than making the round. The latter is sometimes understood as a matter of exerting dominance and/or favoritism. It does boil down to having milestones against which progress can be benchmarked. That way it is easier to spot when someone needs assistance, even if the person may not actually be aware of. If there is no specific set goal bringing up performance or trying to help someone getting back on track may be perceived as criticism as the goal now appears to be arbitrary. But more specific to the question, if you need to keep tabs on things, a formalized setting (i.e. meeting) is better as it allows people to prepare themselves and individuals are not singled out. Creating good meetings (as opposed to massive time-destroying wormholes) is an art in itself, though. Just to reinforce (and of course, this is just my experience), in a setting where there is a power imbalance (i.e. boss vs. employee) and beyond a certain group size, walking up on them is almost never perceived in a positive way, unless you are super charismatic and have a fantastic group dynamic going on. In your mind it may appear that you swoop in and boost everyone's morale and increase productivity. However, if they are already reluctant to ask for help, then it is more likely that it is perceived as criticism and meddling.

No, the do not actually use the bacterium but rather introduced the gene that codes for that specific protein into the plant. Once integrated into the plant genome it will be produced just like any other protein.

Actually in some areas they actually do, to some extent. More commonly papers that rely on modeling and/or statiscs get replicated in silico,e.g. using different test or validations sets.

A friend of mine (who works in a company in a non-science role) basically said that the reason why academia is so ineffective is because many foster infighting (who gets on which paper, who gets to evaluate which data, whose name is on grants. who is allowed to write grants) rather than creating win-win situations. If everyone benefits from everyone else, being an arsehole just hurts yourself.