CharonY

I agree with your last statement. But from personal experience I would disagree with the one before a little bit. I overstated the the ease with which it is possible, though. I should rather rephrase it that it is possible, just not on a regular basis, unless the field is very very narrow. I.e. you do not have more than a dozen or so qualified reviewers. I also have to add that in the cases where I was approached by the reviewers and thus got my guesses confirmed, the reviews were all positive, of course. It rarely happens that someone admits of shooting down someone's paper. It also depends if the PI is actually doing the review or whether he is passing it on to his postdocs. The latter should actually not happen, but sometimes it does. But again, it depends on the field and how well you know the opinions of certain groups within the fields. If the review includes very specific viewpoints one can deduce it fairly well at times. Edit: K, so Cap'n and me bow to Mokele's wisdom at the same time. All hail the lizard.

Wait a tick, aren't you in the UK? AFAIK there you also have to become PI as opposed to being postdoc before you can even begin to dream of a permanent position. Too long of postdocing is, in most systems, a career killer. Also, of course, this only applies to a career in academia. One should not postdoc (in academia) if one wants to have a career outside. Quoted for truth:

What Cap'n says is mostly true, once you know other experts on your field you will recognize their style. However the basic idea is that as an referee you can give points without fear of repercussions. Another aspect is that there is a lot of academic infighting. Essentially you have to see that everyone in a given field is a potential competitor as well as potential evaluator for a given grant. Also, like it or not, junior scientists are always at a big disadvantage. Now, if you are a junior scientist reviewing a senior bigshot and realize that the paper is crap you are in a bind what to do. Shoot it down, but fearing that it will have repercussions on your career? I am not saying that there will be any, but the fear that something might happen, especially in an uncertain career as academia, one tends not to take chances. Academic science is not a magical fairy land where human nature suddenly dissipates. Couple it with the high-risk career it entails and you can easily see why it is unrealistic to assume that science will be conducted in its purest form. Humans tend to get in the way.

So, you suggest burning the children, too?

Nope that is something entirely different. The OP was talking about nano-sized actual drugs. Also I am pretty sure that homeopaths would not use words like "polypeptide" or use nano as a measure of size.

Well, not surprisingly as I assume that BBC does not regularly employ microscopy experts in their staff. I am pretty confident that I will get higher sensitivity with a LC-MS than, say CNN's most active Twitterers..

Huh? Nanoparticles or dispersion into nano-sized particles have been under investigation as vehicles of direct drug delivery for quite a while now. How does that connect to homeopathy?

Though I am pretty sure that such a publicity stunt can easily backfire. In the worst case it will be seen as an admission of guilt (those terrorist are indeed part of our community, sorry about that). And even if it is not the case it could be seen as, well, a publicity stunt, especially if it was conducted by an islamic organization. It would be better if they created a neutral help fund for whatever, earthquakes, crime victims and so on rather on concentrating on terrorists. I am pretty sure that it will only reinforce the already strong associations.

So you want to compare all your genes to one reference gene? In that case you should normalize it down to gene copies, e.g. using defined amounts of genomic DNA (though you should know the copy number per genome). Normalization against PCR efficiency usually does not yield good results as the run-to-run variability is quite high. In any case these estimations will not be very accurate. qPCR in general is not too good of a tool for comparing expressions of different genes. It is much more suited to compare the different amount of a single sequence.

Well, the ability to take in criticism is not wide-spread.

Also if muslims started to help out victims of terrorist attacks they may actually appear more guilty to the public. If they are not in any way connected to terrorists, why should they make amends?

Just as a sidenote, I just now found the following paper: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008320 They describe a tool with which one can play around to see temperature changes and models. Here is the tool: http://climatewizard.org/

There are only few that have an open peer review, and even then it is mostly voluntarily. Besides that you will have to check the journal, as Klaynos said. If they do not describe a review process, it is not peer-reviewed. Also a number of database (e.g. Pubmed) only list paper from peer-reviewed journals.

The most important information is missing. What do you want to compare? If you want to compare the expression of a single gene under different conditions, for example, you would do all your runs for each gene individually. Comparing the expression of different genes requires more normalization and is generally still relatively imprecise. The second question is how you want to do the normalization. With a dilution series you essentially can see the dynamic range of your assay and it gives some limited information about the efficiency, but as you do not know with what you start, its use is limited. For a calibration curve one usually takes a known quantity (most often genomic DNA). If you want to compare a single gene e.g from different extractions, you have to run them all in one go, but you do not need the dilution series. It will only tell you at which point (e.g. 10-fold dilution of your reference extraction) the response will become useless (i.e. is outside the dynamic range). So based on what you are saying is that you are not able to detect anything at 10-fold below your reference. Essentially always keep in mind what your reference for any given assay is as you will have to compare everything against it. Also cross-comparison between different genes is tricky and generally not recommended.

Again, you are starting from the wrong assumption. Sequence based functional analysis was made possible by sequence databases. Before they were present you had to do e.g. reversed genetics, as mentioned above. In other words, you figure function first and then proceed to identify the sequence in question.

Back on the Amiga, yes. Their finest hour was nice in terms of dogfights.

OK. So if you got time I would like to take out your brain and try to build a search engine based on that.

Thanks iNow. Based on some of the thread titles it does not appear to be much of a different level than it is here, though. And why am I not surprised that I got a link from you? Have you indexed the net on your harddrive or something?

Somewhat off-topic but I was was wondering whether anyone knows a hard science forum for life sciences? One that goes beyond protocol swapping, that is?

I know that I can move threads (I have not yet moved something to the speculations section yet´, though). But I was actually really asking for opinions as whether it should stay (for whatever reason). But apparently it has become a joke thread instead. Hmmm.

Congrats. Well, it depends really on who is in there, how interested they are and so on. The viva to viva variation (or the equivalent in other countries for that matter) is, as Severian pointed out, usually very high. Now go and find a career, the fun time is over now

Iron poisoning is rather unlikely as the concentration is simply not high enough. As already mentioned, blood tends to be very low concentrated on other nutrients as well. Much data can be found in studies about vampire bats, btw.

It is neither fair, legitimate, about evolution, or a doctoral dissertation to begin with.

I am not sure to which you are refering to, but e.g. the Mann paper from 1998 in Nature gives info regarding the calibration, as well as where they got their data. Usually the data or in case of extremely large sets (as here) the references for the data are given in the supplementary materials.

Switzerland has, as I recall it, a very base-driven democracy. Results like this (i.e. most likely more emotion-driven than rational) are one of the consequences...