CharonY

One has to be careful with these projections. Virtually everywhere (including US) there is a claim that more engineers or scientists are needed. Truth is that companies demand a surplus of scientists and engineers so that they have a large pool to draw from. Unless the situation is vastly different from Germany there is no guaranteed success, either. Of course this is vastly economy-dependent. During the Biotech boom late 90s and 2000 a lot of people got a job almost immediately post-graduation in the biotech area (mostly sales and product management). The projections at that time were also vastly optimistic. In the mid 2000 many companies had to shrink themselves healthy and lay off people. Since 2011 many are on a waiting loop in terms of new hires. The rather obvious thing is that job projections are (similar to most economic projections) vastly unreliable. And finally, there is of course always the actual mechanics of getting a job. Just because there is a need (assuming there is) and you are qualified, does not guarantee you a job. In the end, post PhD jobs are extremely dependent on networking (even company positions). Another thing that I should mention is that many companies (well, I heard it from German and US companies FWIW) are reducing their commitment for on-the-job training and even entry positions require a certain amount of industrial experience. The reason they can do that is the (relatively) high amount of unemployment of already trained personnel. Only if they cannot find someone with experience to fit the spot (or when specialist knowledge is needed) a real entry-level person will be hired. Captain, IIRC you are working in biotech in the Netherlands? Maybe you can share your experience. I am always interested in info from the private sector side.

The point is that one has to have a realistic understanding of the actual situation. A PhD is nothing more than a base qualification that gives you nothing career-wise on its own. As Arete said, many students just concentrate on their degree and do not realize that getting a career afterwards requires a serious long-term strategy. Another rather depressing aspect is that landing a job is often not a function of your (scientific) abilities. For both academic and private sector hiring is often based on intangibles. In other words, things like a high publication rates alone will not guarantee a job. It is really important also to invest time in career building rather than just doing ones job (goes for grad students as well as postdocs, for that matter).

I suppose he/she is a master student (usually a little bit below a classic German diploma in education, at least on the practical side). There are also a number of nice reviews out there for a lot of different contexts. That being said it would be helpful to closer define the scope (e.g. organism? origins/evolution? functions? mechanisms? etc.)

You will have to look what kind of position actually exist. There are not many pure research positions. Most principal investigators are also college teachers. There are of course research institutes which sometimes have fewer or no research load, but the positions are extremely rare (much more so if limited to a given topic, of course). I am not aware of consulting positions outside of think tanks (again, not really a mass market). TBH what you describe is something most students drawn to science are interested in. Thinking about problems and conduct experiments. In reality the job market and requirements are quite different. Also, if you manage to obtain a non-term, non-teaching research position (again, a very rare thing), your job will mostly entail securing funds, networking, managing people, etc. In fact, the more successful you are as a scientist, the less time you will have for science. Sounds paradoxical, but is unfortunately true (and is another reason why people leave academia). Meeting with people in the job and talking to them is definitely the right way to go. Note that companies tend not to do a terrible amount of research. Often, innovations are grown outside the private sector and then grow into startups, for example.

This is most definitively not the case. As a note to Ringer´s data, they are from an older survey and the situation has gotten much much worse due to the economic downturn. Also note that the majority of PhD holders do not remain "lab-rats". Actual in-lab positions for PhDs are almost always transient and based on term-contracts. Postdocs are in quite a way waiting positions with a lot of uncertainty of getting a tenure-track position (which is filled with uncertainty of actually getting tenure). The funding rate of 18% mentioned by Arete is actually way lower for junior scientists (usually assistant prof level) as the majority of funds are awarded to well-established groups (i.e. often groups that already had funding). First-time success rate was way below 10% (often around 2, I was told). Just to reinforce what Arete said, a PhD alone is not a goal to anything. You will have to identify the position you want to get and for some you may need a PhD. However getting an academic position is very competitive (roughly 20 % of all PhDs will get tenure eventually) takes a long time (depending on discipline most tenures are granted around the forties). There are arguably more industrial positions, but even they can wait and select the best fit. This does not mean having a PhD but having a lot of hard and soft skills (especially the latter) that makes a candidate more attractive. Just to give some real-world number: the average number of candidates for a given tenure-track position are usually 100-200 (depending on how attractive the position is), in industrial settings the numbers I have heard range from 50-200. All of them with PhDs and usually considerable relevant experience and skills. As you can see, a PhD barely covers the basics. Note: this is not to deter anyone from pursuing a PhD (we need cheap labor, after all), but it is important to decide on a career path prior to entering a PhD track. This is more akin to a technician position and most of the time requires a master degree (or bachelor plus proof of experience).

As StringJuy said, the hand lens is not held at fixed distance from your eyes,which would force your eyes to change focus. Instead, you normally keep your eyes relatively relaxed and adjust focus by moving your hand.

Bleach is actually not that great, as it will render the bones brittle. IIRC a standard way was to macerate in warm water (which will take quite a while and is not terribly pleasant). Boiling is probably faster though, but has to be done somewhat carefully to preserve the skeleton. To bleach it up hydrogen peroxide can be used.

Moved to speculations.

The scope of the question is actually quite broad and not easily addressable in a short post. One has to understand that DNA is not a simple static molecule in which only the sequence of bases carries information, but it also has a certain dynamics which involves e.g. proteins that control actual expression of encoded genes. Among the factors that are actually inheritable, DNA modification (i.e. methylation). By methylating specific areas on the DNA, expression can be altered. These methylation patterns can be maintained and passed on. Reversion of mutations can occur on several levels. Either an additional mutation restores the former phenotype, or, the mutation site can mutate again back to the original base (or one that results in the same encoded AA, usually the third base in a triplet). The latter is not terribly common, but may be selected for. This means that while for any individual cell a reversion is unlikely to happen, within a large cell pool those revertants (i.e. cells that restore the original codon or a homologous one) may be selected for if cell functions are inhibited by the mutation. Hence, the rate of revertants may be higher than expected (again, provided there is positive selection). For regulatory areas more leeway may be there in terms of restoring functions, but one must keep in mind that regulation is based on equilibrium reactions and there are generally only quantitative changes (rather than on/off regulation). Note that one should not confuse it with epigenetic control as the modification of DNA (i.e. methylation) is generally not considered a form of mutation.

I am not sure whether we are talking about the same thing. A truly photographic memory would entail a high-detail (i.e. photographic detail) in your mind, regardless of the ability to e.g. draw or reproduce it. If the flight over New York was memorized photographically, he should be able to recall accurately the number of windows from on a building from a given point of view, for example. I.e. walk back in the saved memory and recall everything with absolute detail (again, something that would somewhat clash with the way we think perception works). The drawing itself, while providing quite some more details than most would be able to reproduce, have nowhere that amount of detail. It would be interesting to reproduce photographs from corresponding angles to see whether at least the rough details were accurate, though. To me, there appears to be discrepancies (though it could be a perspective thingy).

I would agree with that. Especially due to the way memories are re-created in the brain it is highly unlikely that something true photographic could exist (at least not with high level of detail).

I would be careful to extrapolate these studies. First of all we are talking about mice. Perinatal development is quite different to humans, so discussions into that direction are at best premature. It is quite interesting, though and it may be worthwhile to look at it more closely.

Well, AFAIK there is little evidence that photographic memory actually exists.

Using glasses with different dioptres can result in headaches until the brain adapts to it. In addition, the eyes (and long-term presumably also the brain) adapts to the different focus while using certain glass strength and after removing them they will focus wrongly. Continuous use of glasses of a wrong strength will result in your eyes adapting to them and may affect your normal eyesight. Ideally, you should have reading glasses that correct your eyesight as little as necessary (i.e. have it measured by an optician) to avoid larger problems.

None that are homologous to bacterial ones (AFAIK) or which are referred to as restriction enzymes. However, there enzymes with nuclease activities in eukaryotes. Often, they are involved in DNA repair. In addition there enzymes that are involved in DNA dynamics and replication with endonuclease activity. Generally they are not very sequence-specific however.

Both are commonly used interchangeably, but in my experience calibration curve is more used in settings where assays are being established or developed or when instrument tweaking is involved. "Standard curve" is more often used when a suite of (more or less) established analyses are being performed. This may due to the more flexible way to establish assays and the use of "standard" or "normalization" could be slightly confusing. But for the most part it is semantics.

For a calibration curve you would generally only use data points corresponding to dynamic range of the measurement. The reason is that in most cases you want to perform a linear regression analysis as a measure of the quality. For the most part these type of analyses follow linear or exponential functions and as such at most semi-logs are used. Log-log is more appropriate for power law relationships. In this particular case a log-log curve does not tell you much except (as ewmon pointed out) showing the part where the linear relationship fails and hence the calibration curve is useless. Not necessarily unimportant, but you can estimate that by eye, too.

A log or semi-log plot is easy to do, but I do not really see that it is necessary here. Just by looking at the values it is apparent that you are outside the dynamic range of the assay in certain areas of your graph (or assuming that you used absorbance reading in a standard photometer the dynamic range of the instruments is to blame). In any case, to make such a plot just calculate the logs using the =log function in excel or simply scale the axis to a log.

Actually I think it is part of the news embargo associated with Science articles and I think Nature has a similar policy (for the arsenic paper). Only after a certain amount of time you are allowed to publicly talk about accepted manuscripts. And this stuff is probably still somewhat far away from publication.

Forget what?

I would be surprised if they put in an ESI the chances for failure would be far too high (e.g. clogging, not to mention the requirement for liquid handling). My assumption is that it is mostly designed for gas phase analysis. As such I feel that the capabilities would be severely limited. In addition, I do not think that they put a high priority on the search for biological molecules, when they designed the system. I assume that the likelihood for finding something would be too low for the costs involved. Edit: I am being stupid, imatfaal posted what they had: a GC. Presumably it is coupled to the quad and TLS (with switchable lines for example). EI is the most likely ionization strategy, then.

AFAIK it is not clear whether eidectic memory actually exists. The memory of elephants is presumably pretty good, but I am not sure of extensive studies on this topic (and how much difference from average human memory capabilities are). Finally the discussion of memory is very broad. It can be be discussed on the biological/physiological level, or one could discuss memorization techniques.

Depending on ionization source these instruments can indeed be used to identify biological molecules, though I expect that the are primarily used to identify simple molecules and not for example proteins or peptides. Of course there are also smaller organic compounds that may be indicative of biological activity. To be honest, even if those were found I would not be terribly excited (as scientist). I would be more interested in the nature of the organism (and how similar or different they are from terrestrial lifeforms). Just finding evidence is somewhat intriguing but I feel it does not ultimately teach us much.

maybe you need to enable javascript? Alternatively you could try connecting with a proper irc client?

There is also a book on the topic: Peter J Feibelman "A PhD is not enough"