CharonY

So it is a pairwise comparison with replicates? A t-test should do the trick.

I doubt that there is reliable data out there. For instance, there is a gay community in Iran (there was a report on it a while ago on PBS, I think). Their non-existence is just the official line....

This journal does not appear to be peer-reviewed and half of the paper does not support its main points. To call the presented evidence weak would be flattering.

It has little to do with hate per se. The major reason why academia is not considered the real world is because it operates on a number of different rules than e.g. companies. Academic research is set and funded around established scientific communities plus it operates as a provider of higher education. However, job advancement and structure and deliverables are quite different from, say industrial careers. Thus, e.g. academic science and corporate science start off from the same track (i.e. university education) but somewhat after the PhD it splits up running parallel to each other (with some exceptions). Since academic research is often somewhat self-contained (though heavily dependent on government funds), and the majority of PhDs eventually leave academia behind (due to lack of jobs for example) it is considered to be apart from the real world. This is also reflected by the fact that uni experiences does not easily translate into industrial or corporate experience. Edit: this is from a heavily biased viewpoint of the natural sciences, btw.

Well, partially true. It is likely that its origins were defense against transposons and viruses. However, it has also been shown to play a role in endogenous gene regulation. It has been shown that sense and antisense RNA is being produced (I think one of the first papers was in Drosophila 2000 or 2001). And it appears that this is also regulated by silencing.

The recognition is based on the sequence. If it fits, it gets diced. RNA looks the same, regardless of origin.

There are a lot of things involved. First of all, getting into science is an incredible incentive to publish things quickly, especially if one is more junior (as the corresponding author). Secondly, it is something that the reviewers should have picked up, but did not. It is quite possible that the authors pushed it out quickly with the intention to add more data, if the reviewers requested them. Apparently, they did not.It is not clear, for instance, what background the respective reviewers had. Also note that the article had a lot of senior authors (including e.g. theoretical physicists), whose contribution to the work is not clear to me. Also note that NASA did not publish it per se, but the work was funded by them. They do not have a great track record when it comes to microbiological findings. So there is likely the combination of lack of expertise in specific areas, the desire to publish high, and being funded by a high-profile agency and the juniority (is that a word?) of the corresponding author. Plus probably a lot more that I have no direct insight into. There is a reason why in many specific areas Science and Nature are not regarded as high-quality in terms of data. They like to publish cool and interesting things, rather than meticulous work. Though of course the cynic could argue that it is easier to spot errors in these highly visible journals.

This has been discussed in two other threads. The controversy is more that it got published as it is, rather than due to the difficulties to demonstrate it. Several have proposed that looking for mass-shifts in MS spectra would be a far better indicator than the indirect measurements in the article. The author was actually asked pretty much the same. I am pretty sure there have been some requests for the DNA by now.

It helps with regards to the efficiency of ligation (as religation would occur more often than ligation with the large fragment). Especially with blunt end ligation it will be tricky. However, at a certain size the overall cloning efficiency goes down, so that it does not help anymore. It is more time efficient to repeat the cloning experiment than trying to create a 30 kb plasmid. It depends on the backbone a little bit, too. But 10 kb should still work (albeit with low efficiency). Over 15 kb I would look for a different vector system.

Generally the cloning efficiency is reduced with fragment size, and transformation efficiency is inversely correlated with overall vector size. Both vectors are relatively small, so the overall construct should work out. There are other vector systems designed for larger fragments (e.g. comsids or BACs) but for 10 kb it is a bit of an overkill. It may require some tries, but I do not see any critical problems. Functional heterologous expression is tricky, though. You need the right promotor and then the products have to be functional thing in the new organism. In order for that to work you would need either include the native promotor and hope that it will work in E. coli, which is rather unlikely, considering that it comes from a Gram+ bacterium. The alternative is to get a inducible plasmid with a compatible promotor and only insert the promoterless operon. Traditional expression vectors are used for overexpression, however, and this may not be well suited (in the worst case it will kill of the bacterium). I would search for some inducible, low level promotors as a first starting point (I do not remember any off the top of my head, though).

One could also go back in history of western societies. As mentioned, separate bedrooms (or separate rooms for that matter) were not that common. It would be or interest to see, how they managed it then.

It really depends. For practical purposes approximations without salts are often used. Overall, the empirical approach tends to give results more reliably. For more accurate assessments, nearest-neighbor thermodynamic theories with corrections for salts are used. There are oodles of tools that include it (I think primer3 does it, for example). There was work from Honda in the 90s or from Schütz that dealt with that. I would look for the terms and the authors as a starting point.

You want the molarity of the solution (i.e. mol/L). You have the density (which is off). You have the volume. You still need the molecular weight. Edit: cross-posted.

In addition, one could argue how to define a particular field. Biomedical + Biology contains a lot of topics and is arguably much broader than the field of astronomy. I.e. consisting of more (and often closed) communities. This is also reflected by the people working in the fields. Microbiology is still dominated by biologists, whereas biotechnical applications of bacteria is in the domain of biotechnologists and bioengineers. In the area of molecular biology we got biochemists, analytical chemists (and equivalents), biophysicists. Biomedical is quite a different beast altogether, with a very different composition.

There are long range (also called extended range) polymerases that you may want to look into (from the usual manufacturers). Note that quite some of them are not proof-reading. But I had used some that were successful for long high GC amplifications. I cannot remember the name off the top of my head, though (it's been a long while).

It appears so. One question would be whether the pH is stable over the time (considering the relative low concentration).

Excellent. That was what I meant with the mutation at the indicated position. Regarding journals, isn't there a way to access the journals that your uni is subscribed to via proxy? Often the library website has links for that. For HY, check male antigen.

My advice is to follow up the papers that have been cited as well as search for reviews on that particular area (alternatively, get a good textbook and check out the appendix). Especially pay attention to the references in the introduction. I am not an immunologist, but based on the abstract we can conclude that the mouse line in question has a mutation at the indicated amino acid position of LAT. This inhibits the interaction with the PLC-γ1 protein resulting in the described developmental effects. They created another mouse line in which this problem was circumvented to study the interaction with LAT and PLC-γ1 without the developmental interference. HY is an antigen that is recognized by TCR. From the little what I remember the system played a role during T-cell selection.

Well, you have to distinguish between basic research in the areas (which is often done outside of companies), drug design and galenics and the actual manufacturing process. Each of them represent several different career tracks.

I think this is somewhat contested here. Better off than the poor in poor/underdeveloped countries, sure. Better than other developed countries? That is what is being discussed here.

In the paper proper it really depends on the reviewer . What one may perceive as acceptably vague may be an important aspect to another to be verified. Since papers often deal with non-canonical knowledge, reviews include quite a bit of subjectivity.

Heh dealing with editors (or reviewers for that matter) requires a different vocabulary . Sometimes it does not pay to be too clear at that point .

Assuming your swimming pool is a perfect fermenter you will get a huge lump of cells, depending on agitation.

My guess is that the swimming pool would be full of bacteria and fungi in no time.

Also, this can be easily monitored in a simple experiment in which you monitor for sheared products. I gave a course on capillary electrophoresis and with increase of the cycle (and everything kept constant), detection (in form of noise) of unspecific signals appeared. But almost everyone has seen sheared genomic DNA in agarose gels, too.