CharonY

Actually you should just start off reading a few articles (even Wikipedia) about DNA and RNA and the very basics. The problem is that you base your assumptions on a very inaccurate guesstimations and any info given right now will probably just lead to confusion at best.

I am just wondering, does it make sense here to make a distinction of natural science and other sciences? In most discussion here science is equaled with natural sciences. Obviously there other branches including the humanities which are also claimed to be sciences but often use different methodologies. And there are gray areas in which those overlap, for instance psychology and in some cases (e.g. case studies) even medical sciences.

Precisely. Natural selection is not something that has a function. It is just something that happens. The outcome is just that different phenotypes happen to have different reproductive success. And in retrospect we call whatever happened, natural selection. Incidentally it also explains why immortality is not universal. A simplified view is that more varied and complex the tissue of an organism becomes the harder it is to control cell replication in a way that avoids negative effects (e.g. as manifested by cancer). Hydras as well as unicellular organisms have a very simple arrangement and have little trouble to be virtually immortal. Yet the complex structures of e.g mammals allows them to use different ecological niches than the simple organisms. Longevity also does not increase fitness, if the time frame of possible reproductions is not equally enhanced. Except, of course, in social animals and maybe even some other situations in which one promotes the fitness of closely related individuals.

Nope. The only measure of fitness is the amount of offspring you create that in turn are able to create offspring. Also you will have to consider that direct competitors are usually those that try to fill the same ecological niche and not those that hunt each other. If an organism utilizes the niche more efficiently by and creates more offspring they are fitter, regardless whether they are stronger or smarter. Cockroaches are a prototypical example. They are hardly the smartest critters on earth and clearly do not overpower much, but if they beat the heck out of a lot of animals in filling (urban) ecological niches.

It would help if you could state what you are interested in and what type of macromolecules.

Actually I think stupid in this regard is a good choice as it reflects the transition from student to scientist. As a student there are (apparently) answers to all questions. Or at least you job is more or less to memorize them. However this stops when you start doing science. You think it is daunting and a challenge if you already stopped being in the frame of mind of a student. But if you still are, you will assume (and I can tell you, a lot of students do) that there has to be an (easy) solution. But not getting the answers, which they assume that they should be around, makes them feel... well, stupid.

Though it would be more accurate to call them social democratic as socialists may be interpreted in the Marxian sense (you know, dictatorship of the proletariat). In the US the terminology is often fuzzzy in that regard.

Also by far not all possible chemical reactions have been mapped out yet. Chemistry is not only about identifying elements, but more importantly it deals with interactions.

I do not know the drug. And the information you provided is a bit scant. However, you state that it is a competitive inhibitor. The question is, for what? A short googling reveals that it inhibit proton pumps (which are necessary for creating the acididc environment in the stomach), though I did not find any reference whether the mode is competitive. Pepsin, on the other hand, is is a protease that gets secreted in an inactive form (pepsinogen) before cleaved (and thus activated) by HCl. Lack of acids may inhibit that. In addition, its pH optimum is at pH 2 and it starts denaturing at pH 5. Lack of if the production of acid in the stomach is significantly disturbed, it may thus inactivate pepsin.

1) it depends on what specimen you can easily get and what equipment you got. Essentially it boils down to the methods you got which allows a proper homogenization and of your sample and effective lysis of the cells (e.g. bead beater or something similar, liquid nitrogen etc.). 2) if you use a kit, read the manual carefully. RNA extraction is in principle fairly easy, but you have to keep everything clean (ie free of RNAses). If you are not using a kit, I would recommend the book Molecular cloning (Sambrook et al.) it has a very nice chapter regarding RNA extraction protocols. Obviously, inform yourself before start the actual experiment. 3) Depends really on what you used as specimen and what further equipment you got. Quite obviously you cannot expect to generate important data by a simple experiment. But things to consider are, e.g. QPCR to measure abundance of a given RNA (provided some sequences of the specimen in question are known), amplify and clone rRNA (or rather the reverse transcribed cDNA) for sequencing and phylogenetic analyzes, etc. But I reckon that on the highschool level a) getting RNA at all is pretty good already. A simple thing you could do is check your RNA for DNA impurities.

Well, if you think in terms of creating the traits, this is neither possible nor allowed right now. But in cases of in vitro fertilization it is possible to test certain properties (including gender) and only implant those with the desired traits. This is allowed in a number (but not all countries).

Well, physiologically it is almost impossible just to leak nutrients out of a functional cell (it would not be viable otherwise). At the very least a transporter has to be involved.

Well, it appears that you are actually sensitive against caffeine. Especially given the fact that it takes relatively long to get the caffeine out of your system. In other words, you need less to get the maximum effect (which will be individually different) whereas others require more to get the same symptoms. There are of course also those that have a high caffeine resistance (no crash but no buzz either).

To be fair, evolution of sex is a very complicated topic. Much too advanced for something like a highschool assignment. What iNow implies is that recombination via sexual reproduction may increase variance and hence increase fitness. The problem however is that sexual reproduction is associated with a two-fold cost compared to asexual reproduction. Moreover, even asexually reproducing organisms have means to increase variance by horizontal gene transfer, and finally as far as I am informed there is precious little data that supports the notion that sexual recombination actually does increase fitness. Some studies suggest that sex may have originated from genomic parasitism. See for instance: Hickey DA, Rose MR: The role of gene transfer in the evolution of eukaryotic sex. In The Evolution of Sex. Edited by: Michod RE, Levin BR. Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Associates; 1988:161-175

Actually according to most papers tryptophan content in rice is rather low. In livestock with rice based diets tryptophan is supplemented. There are GM versions with high tryptophan content around, but I do not think that they are used for human food yet. Also tryptophan itself is not calming, but serotonin (of which tryptophan is a precursor). According to Comai et al (International Congress Series Volume 1304, 1 November 2007, Pages 227-232). Rice had the lowest (non-protein) trp concentration. To have any effect you would have to eat rather enormous amounts of rice and rice cake. The same is for milk btw. The amount is too low to have any true effect. It is likely that having any drink that relaxes you will have the same effect. And yes, the same is true for turkeys. There are estimations out there that one need gallons of milk and around 30 pounds of turkey to get trp concentrations with any physiological effects. And that is only if you are able to utilize all that is present in the meat/milk/rice. The bioavailability (the amount that can be actually utilized by your body) is only a fraction thereof. In addition for the sleepiness part only the tiny remaining amount that actually passes the blood-brain barrier will have any effect. This fraction (given that in about any protein containing food trp will have the lowest abundance), is so incredibly low that even those vast amounts underestimate things. Sounds like urban myths to me, I am afraid.

I addition to what swansont said, social Darwinism is based on a gross misrepresentation of Darwin's original ideas. In other words it is an ideology that is not based on any scientific foundation.

I could dig them up, but I stated: . In other word I only talked about conditional surrender to begin with. I assumed that my statement implied this. Note, however that MacArthur and Nimitz apparently saw not big military role in the use of the bomb. But while we are at it, some more estimations for completeness sake (Wikipedia again this time): A link to the Soviet factor: http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0803-26.htm

Maddox.

What kind of column is it? Generally the only thing you can do is flush it. You may also reverse the flow (ie reconnect the column the other way round) to improve removal of impurities. For RP columns I recommend successively water, methanol, Acn, isopropabol, hexane, isopropanol, and then whatever your mobile phase is. The idea is to decrease polarity, while ensuring miscibility with each of the following solvents (that is what isopropanol is there for).

Well, to be fair some American generals objected to the bombing. From Wikipedia:

This is a bit of a stretch. Japan was already involved in peace talks with the Soviets. The one point were they were undecided on was the unconditional surrender. With emphasis on unconditional. Another aspect on the US side that led to the decision to drop the bomb was the desire to end it quickly rather than engage in lengthy talks (and deterrents to the the Soviets). However there is not enough evidence to project that they would have never surrendered and that the bomb was the only way. http://www.worldwar2database.com/html/japansurrender.htm

I honestly cannot see how it could have lasted 20 more years. Germany was already defeated and Japan was essentially on its knees (and entering peace negotiations). It has been argued that by the end of the year Japan would have surrendered anyway. But even if they hadn't there was not sufficient military power left in Japan to last 20 years. Especially as they were also sustaining heavy losses from the Soviets.

I do not think that rice should have any particular stronger effect than any other foodstuff. For a big part it is simply starch.

Uh. Benzodiazepines?

It should not be as DNA exists stably as a double helix (except during events like replication and transcription that is). To evaluate the apparent discrepancy it is necessary to know how this values were generated. E.g. it could be that it was just a measurement of the individual bases (e.g. by chromatography) of different cells. So both experimental as well as intra-individual differences may account for that. However one would also expect slight variability for the individual G and C content. Or you could have extract from cells that are in the process of replication and so that you could get unequal yields. What is clear is that it is not based on sequence data as automatically A would be equal to T. And the AT would add up with GC to 100%. Polyadenylation happens after transcription. It is not encoded within the genome. And even if it was, the anti-parallel strand would carry polyTs in that case.