CharonY

25 is surely not too old. However, consider what you want to do with a PhD. Independence is not necessarily one of the things you will get. In industry you obviously have a project to manage (or something in that line), whereas in academia you will not reach independence up until you get tenured, which usually happens when you are in your forties (and which only around 20% of all PhDs will manage to get). And even then you have to be in a competitive field that may pull in grants. Finally, interdisciplinary sounds good, but be aware that it may actually make it harder for you to get a position way later on (I am talking from experience here). The reason is that most departments are still organized along the common disciplines. An interdisciplinary research often has a worse fit than someone in the traditional area. It is easy to make a postdoc, maybe even assistant prof. But tenure can easily become a massive hurdle. Also note that some interdisciplinary areas are more established than others. The less established ones are usually even more of a problem. In other words, be wary of the hype. Finally, grades are usually only of interest (in a bad way) if they are abysmal. Lack of research can be countered if you start in the lab as an intern (it depends a bit how desperate a lab is in need for bodies and how fast you can learn your way around the lab).

I assume that many will already have read that the often cited paper linking autism to vaccines has retracted. Little to debate there. However an interesting point was made by the editor of the Lancet (the journal in which it was published) made an interesting point: What do you think? http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/did-the-media-inflame-the-vaccine-autism-link/?hp

Uh, I kind of disagree with that. It depends on what you want to know. In some cases it is particular interesting to look at non-selective areas.

There are various options, depending on how you inserted the insert to begin with (and what kind of vector it is). Do the promoters have convenient MCS or are they part of the insert?

Or pre-emptive death penalty. If you kill everyone, no crime will happen ever again.

I believe that there is no discussion here.

That is a bit arcane. If the editor does not deem it publishable or out of scope it can be fairly quick (a week or so). Unless the editor is sick/traveling/drunk/shark hunting. If it goes to peer review it depends a lot on the reviewers as well as the journal. A month would be really fast and it can take up to half a year to get a note. If referees do not agree it can be sent out again, taking more time.

Indeed. The therapeutic index is normally given as LD50:ED50. To nitpick: it does not necessarily that it would be 641 times the chance of getting killed (or getting killed half the time) as the the Dose:response relationship does not have to be linear (it rarely is, actually).

So you wan to know which other hormonal signals are glucose regulated? Generally of course everything connected carbohydrate metabolism and homeostasis. Of course, you should be aware that not in all cases glucose itself, but a derived carbohydrate can be the proximate signal leading to hormonal responses. That being said it can become pretty complicated. For instance, sugar levels in blood can cause regulatory cascades that in turn lead to further regulations and so on. Depending on which level of the regulation you look at the system glucose may not be directly, but indirectly involved. Add to it the fact that many regulatory system integrate several signals (i.e. not solely the glucose level) you can imagine that things can get extremely complex. For instance, insulin production is known to be sugar correlated, however, insulin (together with leptin) is also a signal for arcuate nucleus and are proposed to work as adiposity signals. This, in turn, activates/inhibits the release of rurther hormones. While these are not necessarily directly regulated by glucose on the molecular level, glucose is still the initiator of this cascade.

Isn't it simply more likely that if you bother to talk to your plant that you take better care of it? That reminds me, I should water my plants at some point. And may provide sunlight from somewhere, too. Eventually.

Every novel since i got hooked on Neuromancer when I was a teen and the net was still ascii. I think the only novel I didn't loved was the difference engine. But I cannot recall why.

There is an initiative for physicist to combat cancer, headed by a cosmologist. I am pretty sure frogs fit in. Just do not mention that you are a biologist.

I think the answers that you want to see are more down the road than what the paper provides. They essentially describe a regulatory circuit that are elements in controlling circadian rhythm, and provide evidence that they are indeed elements of the circadian clock. What effects mutations would have are guesswork at best at this point (without physiological data). They are just part of a larger regulatory machinery and it is hard to predict, even if all the targets are known.

Apparently they found out what the news channels knew for a while already. Narratives are more interesting to people than facts.

From a biological viewpoint O2 levels are not terribly hard to measure. Bacteria use oxidation states all the time. To my knowledge an equivalent has not been detected in humans yet (well last time I looked was around 5 years ago), but there is oxygen-dependent regulation going on. On the cellular level, that is. As a side-note, the CO2 comes from the oxidation of C-sources which of course is not limited to carbohydrates.

That makes sense. Yes, you would have a transcriptional reporter system then. Two disadvantages: one is that you got two promoters in your system now, that may interfere with the regulation cascade, if it is tightly controlled. Second that it is obviously only useful for transcriptional analyses. You lose information about other regulatory events as well as localization, etc.

If that was the case geckos would have a hard time getting around. You are talking about the animal, right? They have hairs and pads under their soles effectively increasing their surfaces (and thus surface-surface interactions) massively.

NIH also got a smallish bump. Though much will go into cancer research (as usual).

WB, there is always a underlying risk that the manipulation may affect physiology, regardless how you do it. It is just an accepted fact. Mr. Skeptic, I cannot see how it would work and what it is supposed to accomplish. Maybe you may have misunderstood what a transcription factor is.

Uhm nope. Wrong application. The OP is talking about embryonic development.

It is in the description. If they rely on data from several other group rather than doing it on their own it is a metastudy.

My bad, I retyped it in a rush. Corrected now to (1/100)^12. The point was to show where the 12 came from. The calculation amounts to the same, though (i.e. 0.6 molecules per liter). This is not necessarily correct as the absolute number of molecules present depends on the volume, of course. Given the fact that much smaller volumes are routinely sold, the chances are very low to have any molecules in them, of course.

Shoot, lost my post. To make it short, homeopathic stuff usually comes with a dilution indicator. A common one is 12 C. This corresponds to a (1/100)^12 dilution. Now, if you start with a 1M solution (which is pretty high) you would end up with 0.6 molecules per liter (just multiply the dilution with the Avogadro number). So, of you drink 1 liter of it, you got a 60% chance to actually have ingested one single molecule.... Edit: OK, lost original post and cross-posted. Regarding the meta-study: it is also likely to be a false positive report due to multiple hypothesis testing issues.

What the....? They do not have to register it with the FDA? Now that is scary. And weird. I would have assumed that anything that claims to have any health effects should undergo FDA approval. Or at least testing for safety.

Well, but in reality science only gets so much money. We could get more NIH programs, but we don't. In reality the chances of getting extramural funding are often between 1-10%. The question is simply what to prioritize. If the big money goes into manned flight then simply other areas will be cut. Simply as that. And as Swansont already pointed out, other areas of research yielded better bang for the buck.