CharonY

Unless you get your lady/boyfriend hooked to garlicy food. Then he/she cannot get away and you are set for life.

Follow your interests is certainly a good way to choose the outline of your studies. At certain points one should think about careers, too, however. This includes e.g. decision between master and PhD, or job prospects towards the end of a PhD, for instance. Studying is heaps of fun, but do not confuse it with a career path. And unfortunately, at some point one has to choose. So in short, enjoy the path, but also look towards a goal.

What is the concentration ratio of the of the insert to vector? However, seeing now resistant bacteria (regardless of insert) tells me that either that there are problems during gel extraction, ligation, or transformation. The reason being that even with no insert, the plasmid should re-ligate yielding some resistant colonies. Since you mentioned that you tested the transformation (with the same plasmid?) it appears that the ligation or the gel extraction may be at fault. After extraction from agarose you may want to run a test gel whether you actually got plasmid isolated (also avoid putting it on UV for too long). My suggestion is to make a series of controls, e.g. re-ligate the vector without agarose purification (with and without adding insert) and transform it, cut and re-ligate the vector alone and transform the cut and the re-ligated vector (to check the ligation rate) and possibly test transformation. My guess is that the agarose purification may not have worked out well, but without controls it is really hard to tell.

If it was purely a choice the prevalence of homosexuality would be much higher. Not necessarily, if certain sets of genes involved in the development in homosexual behavior increases fitness in some ways (one study showed that at least one of the identified loci may be correlated to higher fecundity) it could easily persist. Only if it was e.g. a dominant trait it would be strongly selected against. But obviously it is not just one or the other, as in most cases an interplay between genetic basis and environmental factors (including sexual imprinting) will play a role.

Time flies when you respire.

To me the post does not clarify anything. If anything it makes even less sense. There is little to discuss unless the word usage is clarified.

It depends a lot on storage conditions (temperature, light exposure, airtight seal etc.) and what type of bacteria you grow on them and for what purpose. Shelf life is only a very rough estimate at best. As a rule of thumb, minimal media that contain only little to no complex components such as peptides amino acids, vitamis etc. tend to be stable for a very long time. The issue with plates is that they have to be very tightly sealed, otherwise they lose water, obviously. But even with a certain amount of degradation some bacteria are robust enough to handle it. Others are a bit more sensitive and may exhibit changes in growth (or do not grow at all). In the end, there is no fixed expiration date, but for more sensitive (must not fail) assays, fresh plates are a better idea, for standard cultivation storing a few months under appropriate conditions are usually not an issue.

I assume because it is bloody elusive?

I do not understand the description either. Do you mean that only at one stage you do not see a band and in all the others you do? Or do you mean you see it in certain stages but in not in subsequent ones? Are you referring to different proteins? What is the lighter protein? I am pretty sure some crucial information is missing.

I think the naming of the theoretical bodies is quite confusing and is even used in an odd way in literature. Historically, neo-Darwinian is referred to the update on Darwin's theories that abandoned Lamarckian inheritance. What the OP refers to sounds indeed more like the modern synthesis. And currently there is indeed a strong push to integrate new findings into a new cohesive body. A major problem is that we got so much detailed molecular data that it is not trivial to create a comprehensive theoretical framework that is globally applicable. More likely it is going to change gradually by first abandoning or reducing the relevance of parts that were found to be inaccurate and and slowly deriving principles out of the information we got and apply those instead.

Check Dunn, M.F., et al., Biochemistry, vol. 19, 718 (1980). There are variation with differences in speed and recovery, but if you do not really intend to build a column or something similar the described approach should work fine. Just remember that the binding is highly pH dependent.

I do not think that we know the parameters necessary to actually calculate probabilities. The current assumptions are based on the data that we have. I.e. the fact that all organisms ever found clearly share the same ancestors and that so far no exceptions have been found. It is for instance possible that early on life arose several times, however all but what we know today got eliminated. The main argument is therefore less one of likelihood, but rather one of available data. And considering that all biological effects are well accounted for by known organisms, we do not have evidence that any kind of "hidden" alternative organisms exist on earth.

I think my educational level is too low. I do not understand what the post is trying to say. Does it mean that laws of physics are not followed in India?

Are you talking about major facilitator family transporter? If so, why would you assume that it would influence respiration? More importantly, what are the potential function of these transporters? After reading up on that the connection would be obviously metabolites found in the rhizosphere and their potential physiological effects on the cell under investigation.

I kind of missed that part That is simply not true, unless one redefines the meaning of civilization. There are numerous kingdoms throughout history in Africa that actually often had extensive contacts to the other, better known civilization. Using memories from Latin lessons: Examples include Aksumite empire (major commerce center from 100 BC, vanished 800 years later), which was located roughly where Ethiopia an Eritrea is located. Was an important hub in the trade between the Roman and Indian empire. Nubia was a famous empire and was at its peak a major rival of Egypt. And since skin color seems to be terribly important to certain people, they were depicted as dark skinned. Actually, before I make a hole mess out of it, I'd rather just provide this link to wiki rather than to rely on memory Wiki link.

Well for the genera you mentioned I generally found values around 2-3k (you may also want to check the ATCC website, I assume they should also have info on it). I remember at least on continuous culture approach with Oscillatoria (I think) that was even down to 500. But I do not remember details on growth kinetics (and the goal is obviously different from batch).

In addition, one should note that Rushton is not an evolutionary biologist. His ventures into evolutionary explanations were pretty much shown to be wrong as he misapplied evolutionary models and apparently lacked fundamental understanding of biology. See Graves 2002, Anthropological Theory Abstract That being said there are others who looked into the matter and an interesting approach using archaeological evidence was presented (MacEachern, World Archaeology 2006 38:1, 72-92).

This actually makes a lot of sense.

There are a lot of papers around describing culture conditions, although there are apparently variations. One of the older ones is Stanier RY, Kunisawa R, Mandel M & Cohen-Bazire G (1971) Purification and properties of unicellular blue-green algae (Order Chroococcales). Bacteriol. Rev. 35: 171-205. 5000 lux appears a bit on the high side, (most I see is around 2-3k) but that should not be a fundamental issue. Did you maintain day/night cycles? It depends a bit on the form and size of the tank and whether it really gets enough light. I.e. is the vessel suitable for cultivation? If the vessel is sealed and does not have a lot of headspace your culture may run out of CO2 without aeration. Another factor may be errors in media preparation, of course. And finally, what temperature do you have and how is it maintained (this is a major factor)? Putting them near a window does not sound like a very controlled condition.

I am most impressed when students read up thoroughly on a topic on their own (i.e. more than can be found on a wiki page). Also most likely a month too late.

It depends on the precise genetic basis and I do not think that it is precisely known (I may be wrong, though). However, unless it is a dominant trait, it will be maintained within the population if you just select out bald males.

A bit off topic, but in Europe I have pretty much the opposite impression. Brussel is pretty much kowtowing to the gazillion of different demands of basically all European leaders and interest groups, resulting in policies that are confused, contradictory and ultimately useless.

How about the poor correlation of simple measures such as height (which is associated with certain measures of health status and are therefore more likely to be selective)? And why should complex traits suddenly find strong correlations where the obvious ones cannot? Again, the issue is not whether sub-populations exist (they do, as a consequence of migration, and limited gene flow between distal populations). See for instance Tishkoff et al Science 22 May 2009: Vol. 324 no. 5930 pp. 1035-1044. Note that the identified clusters (using polymorphic markers) are not sharply delimited but follow (somewhat) geographic differences. Also note that while African Americans cluster within Sub-Saharan populations, they also have (again, based on the used markers) around 13% European ancestry. Obviously, there is significant mix of many populations (especially African American populations), and certainly African populations are extremely diverse, which makes it nonsensical to use one crude classification scheme (skin color) as proxy. Now I already hear you rejoicing and claiming that there are races and with all the assumptions mentioned above. However the question is to find evidence there are significant and exclusive associations of these markers with any kind of phenotypic traits (with the caveat that association studies are prone to false positive detection). This approach is akin to biomarker studies especially in the biomedical field and the results are overwhelmingly negative (in terms of predictive power). Even with simple traits (such as height) the predictive power (i.e. association with a given population) is low. As I mentioned, plotting body heights does not create a nice size distribution Asian-Caucasian-African, as the OP implies. In other words, knowing the height of a person will not lead in to a good estimation of the population he/she may belong to. The same goes for a lot of other traits. Now think about how much more difficult it is for such a fuzzy concept such as intelligence (which itself is often badly defined and even harder to measure). And as repeatedly brought forth, socioeconmics is known to have a strong influence on these measures, which is very hard to eliminate from these studies. Cross-posted: the reason for selection South Koreans is to point out that these averages are meaningless. The assumption of the op is that there are strong correlation with traits, but large variations within population render these distinction meaningless. It is just playing with averages, while neglecting the spread. Why, for instance are South Koreans considered to be an anomaly? The OP assumes that there is an averageness to Asians, but that is based on the assumption that there is an inherent basis for all Asian populations which leads to lower body height than Caucasians. However, as the above example indicates, depending on which Asian population you look at and which Caucasian we see that it is not the case (I could as easily point out that the difference between Japanese and Chinese is still larger than between white and black US Americans. Using the reasoning above it must mean that Japanese, Chinese and South Koreans have a larger difference (especially South Koreans vs Chinese) than e.g. between black and white US Americans. The OP is effectively operating under the assumption that there must be a difference (and only among the demarcation the OP arbitrarily defines), and all evidence pointing out the opposite have to be anomalies, which is actually the scotsman fallacy.

The problem here is that you are simply ignoring counter-arguments and data, even for the claims that can and have been proven false. Your arguments are mostly not supported by data or research but are based either on talking points or mere assumptions. Let us talk about body height, for instance. Just by looking at wiki the average body height of white US males is 1.789 m. For black US males it is 1.780. For Mexican Americans it is 1.706 (where you would assume a strong European heritage). In contrast, average height in South Korea is 1.739. In fact, if you plot these things out, you will have a hard time to find a strong correlation to something as crude as skin color. I mean seriously, the average height difference between Germans and English people (1.8 vs 1.776) is larger than between white and black US males. Or take South Koreans (1.736) vs South Africa (1.690). Seriously, look at data. Now that the simple measures demonstrate that the assertions are outright wrong, one could still question the measure of highly complex variables, such as IQ or test scores. Unfortunately, here it is much harder to draw definite conclusions in either way. There are however certain effects (such as the Flynn effect) that show that these measures are certainly not static (and thus, on a firm genetic basis). Socially controlled studies (e.g. adoption) have often found not differences, though on average the data sets are of course somewhat small (e.g. Moore Developmental Psychology, Vol 22(3), May 1986, 317-326), though there are probably newer studies around. How much the biology plays a role is certainly quite under discussion, but it is clear that it is a poor predictor e.g. of skin color.

Evidence is especially needed considering that many of the premises can be trivially proven to be false. For instance It is obvious that the diversity of heights in Africa encompasses pretty much the whole range of human heights ranging from pygmies in central Africa, whereas in Sudan (I think) you can easily find people way over 6ft. And this is likely to be true for basically all genetic traits considering that the largest genetic diversity in humans is found in Africa (which also supports the out-of-Africa theory).