CharonY

As mentioned, those folks are not trained scientists by education, but perhaps more importantly, they did not make money via science or research careers. It also helped that their respective families were relatively well-off (not sure about Bezos, tbh). If anything the example actually demonstrates that one should not have an academic career if wealth is the goal. In fact, academics tend to earn less over a career than their counterparts in industry. A part is that after a PhD entry salaries in many industries are at least decent, whereas postdoctoral salaries is often just somewhat higher than minimum wage (depending on where you are) and then by the time you actually manage to get a faculty position, the industrial counterpart has moved on to senior position, outpacing academic salary at every step. Although being lower than industrial jobs, tenured salaries are not bad, but certainly far from making mountains of money (and certainly not anything near mansions). That being said, it is far worse for those who do not get a tenure track position. Sessionals barely make a living, for example. In other words, if you are in just for the money, focusing on research is not the way to go. As others mentioned, the actual reward is in the job itself, though it may depend on the individual to find what is important to them. Teaching, for example can be challenging, especially when you realize that the class dramatically drops performance when you make it harder for them to copy/paste assignments and exams to post online. The joys of online teaching... In addition, in many countries, including Canada, France and Germany (not sure about the UK and not that common in the US) professorial salaries are negotiated as part of public service or similar unions. So there are hard limits on upper salaries.

You were talking about phages. They only work with bacteria and it is fairly to get a site specific construct. Also expression systems typically do not require site-specific insertion into the host genome. The goal there is not to modify the genome, but to express specific proteins (or RNA). Site-specific mutations of eukaryotes are an entirely different thing, but again, you would not use bacteriophages for that one. I mean, if you are actually interested there are a whole bunch of books (including open source textbooks) you could read on that topic.

That's right. They looked vaguely familiar to me for some reason, that could be it.

These are bacteriophages, i.e. they only infect bacteria and there is no need to use CRISPR. They have been used traditionally as a cloning vector since they do not care too much about what is packaged in their heads and can therefore be used for specialized transduction. Nowadays there are versatile in vitro systems that utilize viral recombination reactions which makes the virus itself redundant and can be used to e.g. create mammalian expression vectors and other purposes outside of bacteria.

I would not frame it in evolutionary terms for a variety of reasons. The simplest being that I don't see a good reason to use that framework over classic cell biology. While it is not my field, I think that everyone promoting even only doubling of healthy lifespans is massively overhyping the little we actually understand. To me it seems like we just figured out how to somewhat reliably make fire and now want to create cold fusion based on what we just learned. There are many steps between and these have not been outlined in a satisfying way (and/or include hand waving away massive knowledge gaps and challenges). Note that cancer is not the only issue associated with aging, it is just one of the many things associated with it. Also there many cancer forms where it is more likely to die with it rather than of it (e.g.prostate). The average lifetime risk of getting cancer is about 44% in Canada and 40% in the US. The risk of dying from it is about half that, respectively.

Yeah the desire to get somewhere first or fast is not necessarily the friend of doing it safely, which also applies to manned Mars expeditions. NASA struggled with that, too (Challenger).

No. The method used is typically solid-phase synthesis. But no, if you have no training or background one should not attempt it.

That is very likely the case. However, I will add that there is also literature specifically on stock analysts highlighting effects such as bias due to fund relationships and conflict of interest (e.g. related to incentives), which as a whole is not really surprising. It may very well be the case that these effects over long term tends to even out (I suspect the fact that most investors do not beat the market could be an argument for either outcome). There were a few papers discussing whether analysts were consistently able to make reliable recommendations and the results were fairly mixed. I remember one paper where the authors indicated that past successes were not predictive of future accuracy, whereas some others indicated that there might be "star" predictors who consistently perform well. Otoh one of the top 30 stock pickers was a chimpanzee: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/like-1999-still-a-chimps-party-on-wall-street-2012-12-27 (not really an argument, but I always found that amusing).

I am not entirely convinced (though it could simply be attributed to ignorance on that matter). Roughly from what I understand on a high level values are largely determined by confidence in a particular stock. Now it could be that stock brokers are rational actors and that the system would be accurately described under the efficient market hypothesis. I.e. there are rational calculations to be made and investors largely follow them for evaluation. Under this assumption, things like bubbles do not exist, for example. Interestingly certain investors themselves argue against the rationality of the market pointing toward wild swings (and some use those to create profits for themselves, which in a perfectly rational system would not be possible). There are also behavioural studies indicating that investors do not follow the model of rational actors very well, in part because information is unevenly distributed or sometimes purposefully obtuse and in part because some behaviour can be closer modelled as herd behaviour where someone (influential) asserts or indicates stability or instability in certain stocks and other follow suit. Now this is obviously based on very superficial reading on the matter but what I took away is that the market is potentially more volatile than I assumed it to be.

Vaccine rollout needed to be global to stamp out this threat. However, the opportunity for eliminating the disease may have posed as most countries did not manage to keep infections sufficiently low. Most folks I talk to think that it will become endemic and require continued management (like flu).

In a similar vein, a host of organohalogens such as perfluorinated compounds, are not really biodegradable and have been seen to accumulate in humans and wildlife all over the world (including the arctic).

I think the recent Gamestop debacle shows that stock market values do not need to correspond anything rational per se (or maybe I am misunderstanding your comments).

I think you mean the Youtube auto-radicalization algorithm.

Aside from the feasibility and safety of a manned mission, one oculd also raise the question of how large the influence of private companies in this endeavor should be. As long as it is a purely an explorative/scientific mission, but if, as some posters suggest, there are practical reasons for travel and colonization, the framework might change.

No, it is not the mixing. In fact, both methods require the dilution of the cells you want to count. Also, in both cases it is important that your dilution is high enough that you only get a limited number of colonies, so that you can actually count them. The main difference (actually there are a few more, depending on the bacterium and specific type of pouring medium, but we can ignore that for now), is how you spread your cells. Using the overlay, you swish it a little bit around and let it settle, in the other you have to use a spreader. In principle both work pretty much equally well if you have the right technique, though.

Have you done either of these methods or do you know theoretically how they are done? Can you think of a reason why spreading could cause an challenge compared to pouring?

No.

A recent paper also showed that patients with mild symptoms might not have immunity for long, further providing evidence that vaccination is required. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)00238-5

That is contradictory. On more than one level I might add.

There are a few things that make bacteria more resilient. Many actually do burst, especially after repeated freeze-thaw cycles, but compared to most eukaryotic cells a combination of a bit more simple structure, potentially size but also more robust cell hull allow them to survive better. However, there are also specialists that can survive extreme events (though a few eukaryotes such as the tardigrades (water bears) also fall into that category. Adaptations include changes in the lipid composition (toward shorter, unsaturated fatty acids) to keep it more fluid at low temperature as well as accumulation of metabolites and proteins that prevent crystallization, for example.

Fair enough.

In that context I would like to add that the civil rights protests were at that time, considered unlawful. Moreover, there were also peaceful protests, but also many violent clashes. For example after a police officer shot an African American Soldier on leave during WWII, outraged African American groups protested and it resulted in significant property damage and altercations. During the 60s (i.e. during the civil right movements) there were many waves of violent and non-violent protests. The common denominator is basically the protests were in response to injustice (e.g. not being allowed to enter certain stores, murder of black folks by police and so on). There is a big difference between those clashes instigate by either white or black folks, though and I would be careful to draw an equality here. The race riots in the Jim Crow era were dominantly instigated by white mobs and were often accompanied by lynchings and violent overthrow of governance. Some of the most famous once are the Tulsa race riots of 1921 (or massacre) where white folks, many of which deputized attacked and destroyed a whole district where more affluent African Americans lived. Death tolls are not known but estimates range into the hundreds. During the Wilmington insurrection in 1898 we saw a case where we saw insurrectionists overthrowing the biracial city government again with estimated hundreds of deaths. So the riots incited by the white groups were aimed at destroying affluence and influence gained by black folks and basically crippling their ability to participated in the democratic system. The recent capitol insurrection was less lethal but followed a similar pattern. In fact the violence was not a byproduct of protests, it was the very means to reach their goals. In contrast, the riots occurring during the civil rights period in the 60s were borne from protests (both violent and nonviolent) were borne out of protests against oppression and/or unequal treatment and the violence itself was not the endgame (for the most part). One specific tactic employed by Dr. King in Selma was to incite violence against them in order to create public support that could be used by the White House to pass the bill, which was politically problematic to pass otherwise. However, in modern times the violence against peaceful protesters and journalists(!) have been quickly dismissed by showing the damages caused by certain subgroups of the movement. As such, it does appear that civil-rights type of protests might actually not be terribly effective anymore.

Moreover, sites that keep a high quality of information could get a better reputation (for most, the conspiracy theorists will obviously demonize it). That alone could curb spread of misinformation. Moreover presence of certain content together with the algorithms these platforms use to keep users engaged have shown to present users with increasingly extreme misinformation which could be a path toward radicalization. So if the social media sites kept that content off (or changed their algorithms) it could benefit the situation without government control.

In Germany officers are trained in less lethal gun use (e.g. shooting in the leg) which is against policy in NA. Not sure whether it would have been feasible in this situation.

As a counterpoint, there is the illusory truth effect where folks have the tendency to believe false information after repetitive exposure. Recent studies have looked into the effect of facebook (and other social media) to strengthen misconceptions and it seems that they have a great effect in spreading and strengthening belief in false information. Only the most implausible info ("the Earth is a perfect square" was an example) seem to be unaffected. In other words, uncontrolled spread is not only likely to strengthen the resolve of those who believe it, but is also an entry point for folks to be sucked into these alternative realities. We have seen how spread of those lies not only created some of the most ridiculous conspiracy theories, they also pushed it into a bigger platform resulting in unprecedented spread. I have sincere doubt that allowing them to spread will change anything on the persecution complex of the conspiracy theorists (it seems to be part of the their identity).