CharonY

As mentioned elsewhere, the paper mostly demonstrated high resilience of an organism to As, rather than living off it.

You cannot get the size accurately of uncut plasmids (at best you can approximate using other plasmids with known size). Now you got a semi-log of size over migration length of linear DNA fragments. How would you use that to read out the size? Tip: use the only remaining other parameter.

Also in what area? The best hospitals are usually highly specialized in a specific field. E.g. cancer treatment, cardiovascular diseases, infectious diseases, etc. There is unlikely to be a single country filling all the top spots, though.

I would think that this is somewhat irrelevant for broad comparisons as e.g. between countries. It is almost a no-brainer that there are variations within a country (and yes, there is a study for that, not committed to my memory, though). The goal of country-wide comparison are not to find out which hospitals are the best, but rather whether there are elements (infrastructure, funding, policies, accessibility etc.) on a country-wide basis that affect the health of the respective population. The spread is more interesting to look within a country which local elements pertain to the spread. However, there was at least another study that compared infant mortalitiy in different cities around the world. What they focused on were socio-econmic disparities and found an inverse association with infant mortality and income in an US city (and also maybe in one European one), but I remember that at least in Paris and Tokyo there were none (forgot the other cities, could be London and New York). The strongest was found in the US city though. This is one example of a comparison on the microscale.

What you are looking for is the meninges.

Well, an epi-study without statistical evaluation would not be worth much, would it? But fair enough, I did not quote the statistical analysis. They calculated rate rations and the 95% confidence intervals and for each cause of infant death, which includes congenital anomalies, injury etc. the rate was higher in the USA (within the mentioned CI) with the exception of maternal complications at term. There was another study focusing on socio-economic factors, but I would have to dig for that.

I think, i commented on ti elsewhere already, but it has to be noted that the bacterium does not have an arsenic base. It only has been shown that it is able to incorporate a lot of arsenic, including levels in which P has presumably been exchanged by As (this has mostly been demonstrated indirectly). Moreover, the data is not perfectly clear on whether the cells really utilized As for growth or e.g. managed to do it in presence of the limited P still present (or released from the increased rate of dying cells). At least that was my impression after a quick read a while ago. I still have not gotten to re-read it in more detail, but this paper has been criticized heavily elsewhere. I still consider it a very interesting finding, however, it is not a demonstration of an organism with an As base.

There are comparisons like that out there. One that I had saved was between Canada and the US: Ananth et al. Int J Epidemiol. 2009 Apr;38(2):480-9.

An analogy with skeleton and muscles is probably not very helpful, as the cytoskeleton itself is involved in movement. Actin is involved in maintaining cell shape as well as movement, as pointed out above. Microtubuli are also participating in cell shape, but also are part of intracellular molecular movements. Membranes and cell walls are also elements of cell stability, and so on.

I do not think that you got impurities. First, minipreps generally result primarily in OC, CCC plasmids and then you got multimers (but still closed). So additional higher MW bands are perfectly normal. Linear DNA tends to pop up if some mechanical nicking occurred. From the gel it appears that the additional band is only seen in the phosphatase treated sample? Because the digest alone looks perfectly fine (is it the expected size)?

Isopropanol and ethanol are realatively close in terms of their dissolution ability. Ethanol is slightly more polar and more salt tolerant. However, for cleaning purposes denatured ethanol should be used (due to cost issues). I have no idea why a well-equipped lab is insane (well, two bottles is rather poorly equipped, actually).

The other symptoms could be a panic attack associated with the feeling of loss of control. From what I have heard it is not that unusual. Not necessarily in conjunction with orthostatic hypertension, but with all episodes that may result in the (temporary) loss of body control. Somewhat close to a mild shock IIRC.

70% ethanol is for disinfection. For oil removal you can use either isopropanol or ethanol.

Academic merit alone won't get you very far, as the market is just too crowded to shine with that alone. However, having a strong network will increase your chances being at the right place at the right time.

One simple way is ultracentrifugation after lysis. For more fractions creating a suitable density gradient can be used. The latter is a little bit tricky.

People? Which people? Polls tell a different story. My link. The people (whoever they are) apparently are divided with a skew towards letting the tax cuts expire for the highest earners.

Before we go off into too much speculations check this out My link. I still have not found the time to read the paper in more detail, but she picks out and elaborates a few things that I have noticed by skimming, as well as things that I have missed.

OECD studies are probably good for international comparisons.

Using aggressive methods essentially all plasmids can be transferred into the cell. They just may not propagate (lacking e.g. the proper ori, being lethal to the cell, etc.)

So we have to dance to the tune of the funding agencies as well as to the public? Darn.

Standard curve: plot size and migration length on semi-log paper. You cannot measure size with undigested plasmid with this (think about why and how it is different from the other products). If you can see the markers but nothing else you likely made an error somewhere, as mentioned above.

Magnification/numerical aperture; mechanical tube length/cover glass thickness (for higher NA)

What I have to add is that the bacterium did not have a totally altered phsyiology per se. It is just able to withstand enormous concentrations of As and incorporate it into its chemistry and still survive that. I have only skimmed the paper but from the data it appeared to me that they generally just measured the proportion of P to As (and P was not 0), indirectly suggesting a gradual replacement, rather than full utilization of As. However, I would to find a quiet minute to read it more thoroughly.

Widdekind, the error in that picture is possibly based on the assumption that there is some kind of base state that consists of defined elements. A cell, however, is in constant flux. There is, for instance generally, not necessarily a standard mass m, but rather it would be the minimum mass, immediately after the division. Depending on situation the cell could stay at that for a while, increase mass up until a certain extent without division, or increase mass with division. Cell division regulation is not necessarily coupled to cell mass. In addition, none of the daughter cells is really the original cell. Both really are. The original cell just formed a septum and split itself in two. Except in cases of budding both are pretty much equivalent and it is pretty much arbitrary to define one of the cells as the original. In bacteria you could anchor it on the original DNA molecule, as during replication a second one is formed and moved to the other side of the cell division site. For eukaryotes this is not possible as during mitosis each half of a chromosome gets moved to each new cell. It is purely by chance whether it is the newly synthesized chromatid or the original one. Pioneer, you are heavily confusing meiosis with DNA replication. That is not helping.

Lemur, you kind of misunderstand the research on evolution. Research in the are could e.g. be focused on the use of molecular clocks to time divergence. In that case a hypothesis regarding how it could be done is made and the subsequent analysis should contain controls. Studies geared towards falsifying evolution (and failing) is basically like proposing to build a perpetuum mobile (and failing). It does not add scientific relevant information.