CharonY

A zoologist would provide a better response but essentially birds also undergo ovulation cycles. In addition, after mating many (most?) birds are able to store sperm for an extended period of time, which can be used to fertilize said eggs. I expect that under natural conditions the mating rate is very high and thus the occasional loss due to unfertilized eggs is relatively low. The high production breeds used for egg production are the result of artificial selection of course, in nature they do not lay that many eggs.

There are different ways to assign distances based on similarities, however, the usefulness of local regions to identify loci is dependent on how close the organisms are and how conserved the region is. For instance, it is possible that gene duplication resulted in multiple copies of that particular region in the genome, or the gene region itself may have undergone some kind of changes as e.g. inversions, relocation and so on. In these cases looking at synteny, which requires the addition of surrounding genes and not only the gene region may be of relevance.

To reiterate other posters genes only allow for rough plans. They generally do not encode sufficient information for complex behavioral traits. As such interaction with the environment are required to create functions. So the genes may set certain trajectories, however interaction with the environment is required to produce complex traits (as e.g. personalities). This is the simple basis for the "it is both" answer. Or for a thought experiment: take identical twins, bring one up normally, put the other in a torture chamber for 20 years. Guess who is more likely to have personality disorders.

You do not only lose a particular electrolyte but dilute out all of them. Also you would be surprised how much electrolytes you can lose just by walking around in, say Phoenix at this time of year. However, to have any significant impact just drinking another glass or two generally does not cut it, if one maintains a high sodium diet.

That is wrong. Evolution is slow, but why would you think that the rest would be, too? How are you able to catch a ball if your brain does not quick estimations where it is going to land? Likewise organisms with a sufficiently sophisticated brain easily show signs of creativity. Playing is a trait found in all mammals, for instance. This is biology, pure and simple. Incredulity is a poor argument.

You read too much into the studies. They are of epidemiological nature. Thus they provide no mechanisms. In fact, the link is far from being established and as I mentioned different studies have different outcomes. I would not encourage wild and baseless speculations based on that.

The simplest way is still controlling the intake. While drinking a lot of electrolyte-free water while sweating and urinate a lot will decrease the sodium content, it will result in fluctuations rather than a controlled decrease. If the short-term level of sodium decreases too fast, it will have really nasty effects.

In all games it depends on the mechanism. Being RT and round based is but one parameter. With limited option and easy evaluable outcomes good AIs are likely to make less errors. The Civ games are so open, however that often the generalized, often non-adaptive strategies will lose after one gets the hang of it. In RTS reflexes will be an issue and creating a game where one has to be everywhere at one will put humans at a disadvantage (though games are of course designed to be controllable to begin with). I have heard good things about the Galactic civilization series (I think it is called that) and of course highly sophisticated chess routines have been shown to best the human best chess players. Races are yet another issue. It is possible to program the computer drivers to be perfect (i.e. running perfect laps using the best route etc.). Only it wouldn't be any fun to play. And that is the final bit, computer games are intended to be challenging, but also enjoyable. Even in games where it would be easy to create perfect adversaries, it would not be fun to do so.

For four correct prediction (assuming an equal distribution of right an answers as null) it barely passes an alpha of 5%. For three it would be below that.

Not necessarily. Right now we are calculating the likelihood in terms of how many correct answers he chose in terms of game outcomes. However, the real decision is most certainly remote from the game itself. What the octopus did was choosing from two containers, and that outcome happened to match the game outcome. Let us assume the flag in the background had an influence. Paul chose the German flag five times and other flags twice. If we group the answers according to that, we got 5-2 instead of 7-0. Here it appears that there is a bias towards the German flag. Thus an interpretation could be that we was supposed to choose the German flag, but messed up (or was not interested) in two sets.

Flanking regions just means up and downstream from a given position. A flanking region of an ORF is precisely as you defined it. One could also take any other arbitrary region or position and define bp and and down from it. However, BLAST is a global alignment tool and non-coding regions often only have local similarities. Other alignment algorithm may serve you better (depending on what you intend to see).

Considering the extremely low prevalence of burqas in France (various report estimate between 300-2000 max, out of a population of around 5 million Muslims), I would think that the main reason for this law is (as so often) score cheap points with the voters. And I agree with the above posters that an outright ban is at best counterproductive. The only good part is the protection against forcing to wear it.

I am pretty sure few would have problems with wanting to secure borders and maybe adjusting immigration laws. Or at least streamline them. However, I assume that many, including myself to use "immigrants are dangerous" kind of imagery (including the implications in the OP). Personally I think it distracts from the important points and is a simply a misrepresentation of facts (as statistics show). There are other, better reasons why a country wants to regulate their borders. Of course they do not sell as well. Also there are two distinct points to address. One is controlling the influx of illegal immigrants and the second is what to do with those that are already here (especially those with no roots anywhere else).

The causes are essentially unknown. Many identified risk factors are of the generic flavor, also associated with other cancer types. Now, there are epi-studies that indeed found correleation between sexual activity, masturbation and cancer rates, but as often, they have to be taken with a big chunk of salt. One study found that younger males with higher sexual activity or masturbation rates are associated with a higher risk but that trend inverted for males over 50.Other studies found no association.

There are a lot of alternative explanations. It may have reacted to the onlookers, was trained to grab from the German flag decided once against it, confused the flags, or simply liked the color better. Considering the intelligence of these animals I would not be surprised if the reactions of the watchers played a big role, though.

A repetition of the experiment (i.e. a repetition of a set of seven throws) is a typical case of multiple hypothesis testing. As you surmised correctly, if you repeat it enough it is bound to happen by chance (even if the coin is not biased), depending on the accepted p (with p giving the type I error probability, i.e. rejection of the null hypothesis that the coin is not biased). The correct way (excluding adjustments for now) would be to increase N, i.e. the number of throws. Now to test that you could e.g. use the chi-square test, using the null hypothesis that the coin is unbiased. The critical value, at which point you can reject the null hypothesis with a given p is depending on sample size. Quick example: let us say we use n=7 (7 throws) The expected (e) outcome is 3.5 head (h) and 3.5 tail (t) according to our null hypothesis. The observed (o) outcome is 7 h and 0 t. Then [latex]\chi ^{2}=\frac{\left (oh-eh \right )^{2}}{eh}+\frac{\left (ot-et \right )^{2}}{et}=7[/latex] However the low sample size may force us to use the Yates correction, reducing the the [latex]\chi ^{2}[/latex] to 5.14. With one degree of freedom the chi square distribution table tells us that we can reject the null with p <0.01 or 0.025, depending whether we used the corrected or uncorrected value. So if you did 400 sets of these throws, you would expect to get these results either once (with p=0.025) or four times. The problem with the chi square is that it requires a sufficiently high sample size. Here, a power analysis can be conducted to calculate the necessary sample size required for a given statistical power.

Some short answers: Growth phase: often (but not always) the log phase is taken as the bacteria show highest viability and activity here. Repetition: as high as possible. You need sufficient for statistical testing. The at least 3 is a lousy rule and it is there as with 3 you can calculate an average and e.g. make a t-test. But I would try as many replicates (ideally biological) as possible. Time constraints should be the limiting factor here. I cannot really comment on the interval, though. At the very least you need the t0 (i.e. time defined as zero point), and at the end of the 30 days. Most likely in the middle and maybe a week after the 30 days would add to the safety margin.

Several things: 1) you need to isolate a pure culture first. establishing working protocols on a community is nigh impossible 2) you have to find an isolate that is amendable to genetic manipulation, possibly requiring the development of new vectors 3) chances your modified beast won't propagate and just vanish if you spit on the ground a) the amount of GFP bacteria will be near zero (even if everything else works). Also GFP requires excitation light in the blue range. So you won't see anything in the end (even with excitation). You could sterilize your mouth and hope that your new strain colonizes it properly (even if only transiently). None of which I would recommend you to do, of course.

Great post, blike. Maybe it sounds wrong, but I am glad that I do not have your job.

Either this sentence was not very well thought out, or there is some misconception what biology is...

This is basically what I was thinking. Normally it is best to run each step in a gel, just as a control. However, I am not sure what you mean with: So your uncut plasmid extract yielded several bands all of which higher than the target size? Of course uncut plasmids run differently, but the CCC DNA should actually be faster than the linear form.

Depending what you plan to do afterward and the competition in your job, too long of a PhD can reflect negatively upon you. Unless you can compensate it with a huge output. There is usually a certain amount of expectation of output and time. Biomedical stuff tends to result in less papers than most experimental physics and chemistry fields (excluding big projects like anything CERN related), for instance. But it can really vary a lot from sub-discipline. The point is that one should not be below the average expectation too much.

And even if true, it would only enforce that they are good and bad doctors. Big surprise.

Marat, you are cherry-picking data here. The majority of the gain is due to reduced infant mortality and treatment of infectious diseases. It is not unexpected that at older age medicine cannot prolong life much more. In with the ancient Greeks, if people lived to a certain age, they could well reach their eighties (and quite some famous ones did). Only their chance to reach it was lower. At some point biology kicks in. Few people, regardless of medicine, will, for instance, reach an age of 100 and over. Medicine has shifted the causes of death, though. For instance, in countries with bad medical health care more people will die from infectious diseases than cancer or Alzheimer's, diseases that typically have an onset late in ones life. Ow and hygiene is a sub-discipline of medicine, btw.