CharonY

On the plus side, solder is not addictive. With the possible exception of YT, of course.

A welcome to all the newcomers and what is so great about tonsils?I would rather keep a spare kidney, for instance.

Funny, before he retired Prof. Blume's office was about four doors from mine. Fancy reading something from him again. In any case, I suppose despite the babelfishy translation it should be somewhat clear, or does anyone require a more proper translation? And Kaltwasser just means pre-cooled water. E.g. directly from the fridge (w/o ice).

I second that.

Just wanted to add: MWCO = molecular weight cut-off.

Only a limited number of coding gene regions (and their products) have been identified to date. The current available numbers of genes in humans for instance, is based on estimations, not on actually having identified all of them.

EEeeeek Paul Davies.....

Prokaryotes do not have introns as such. Essentially you have several ORFs one after the other (in some cases even coupled). All under the control of the same promoter. And the resulting mRNA does not get further processed (there are exceptions, but I will ignore them for now).

It depends on the membrane (or rather what kind of channels are present). But a limiting factor is polarity. Glucose is very polar (or hydrophilic), as such it cannot pass a closed lipid membrane despite its relatively small size. Ow and technically glucose can pass through a dialysis tube, because the MWCO is usually fairly large (~3k and up).

Sounds like an excerpt from homework. Moved there.

There are also lead-free solders. Slightly more expensive, though (and you may need a different solder station).

Actually if one would like to be super-precise it ain't that straightforward. For instance, I recall that trypanosomes also transcribe polycistronic mRNA, however they get processed to monocistronic ones before translation. I am pretty sure that there are more exceptions.

No, because it either refers to several ORFs that are being co-transcribed, or (more frequently) to the amount of polypeptides that the final processed mRNA encodes. In effect, the processing step is ignored for this type of classification.

Another (and arguably the more important) reason is fidelity. Just as background: thymine formed by methylation of uracil. But it is also possible to get uracil by deamination of cytosin. So if U is used in DNA and a C converts to U, there is no way to detect this point mutation (as it would not be possible to distinguish between an legitimate and an illegetimate uracil) and repair it. In addition, U is more promiscuous in its bonding with other base pairs as compared to thymine. This is because the additional (hydrophobic) methyl group in thymine inhibits confirmation changes and thus greatly reduces the ability of thymine to interact with other bases as compared to uracil.

Actually in principle this is already possible. If you take a cell from the early stages, it can grow to a whole organism again. Based on this after the first couple of divisions you do not have one potential person, but a dozen of them. Each cell has the potential to grow into a whole person. I call it potential person btw. as conception does not invariably lead to birth. Also, for all intent and purposes the the cells are part of the mother and are not a separate entity (yet), as such imo the mother gets to decide.

I cannot really say which of the compounds I am working was the most hazardous. But on a different note: we got a lab safety update recently and within the memo there was the info that a lab assistant at UCLA died while handling t-butyl lithium. From the report the major burns were on hands and arms and secondary to the body (due to a synthetic sweater and NO labcoat). Overall 40% burns which proved to be fatal.

Sounds like an ethics questions to me. Depending how the thread goes I am inclined to move it into the Bioethics section.

Well technically this is the way it is done for any antibacterial compound. In fact you could add the label "with the exception of resistant strains and species" to all but the the harshest antibacterial compounds.

I would be surprised if that was true. From what I know clinical immunologists without an MD are usually analysts or supervise analysts. The could even supervise a department that does the respective analyzes. However, while they can give recommendations I do not think that they may actually treat patients. I may be wrong, of course but I never heard of anything like it.

The test in question is an (Japanese) industrial standard test, using E. coli and S. aureus. It is of course virtually impossible to create a standardized test that can account for any potentially pathogenic bacteria, so for his purpose it is perfectly reasonable to use a standardized tests.

There is a fast track for academy members (I knew one who had fast-tracked his papers that way). The trick is that you need to secure favorable reviews, but you can choose the reviewers yourself. "Hey Dan, could you just write up that you like the MS?". So, in theory there is a peer-review, only in a way that makes rejections very hard. The good thing is that those papers have something like "Contributed by Member x" on it. Generally it can give young scientists quite a boost if the advisor is an academy member, because the article is published with a rather high profile. Just to add, a while back a student of the above mentioned advisor got his paper into PNAS (using that inside track) and he would not stop bragging about it in front of my PhD students (we had a common brown bag meeting once in a while). So I made a rough calculations and somewhere between 70-90% of all inside track submission get published, whereas the rate for the "normal" way is below 20%. That shut him up and two days later there was a cake with my name on it in the break room. I shared it with the others, just in case it was poisoned.

Well, technically the libraries are not allowed to keep electronic copies, but they will have to maintain subscriptions for the particular years to allow access. Some (many?) journals even cancel all access once your subscription runs out, even for the years that you actually had subscriptions. Yupp. The most expensive one had two color figures, though. Without those I would still have been above 2k. Some of the publications of my wife were even more expensive (because they were longer). Common rates are often between 60-250 $ per page for print journals. BMC for instance, is free, if your institute is member (of if you are), otherwise it is still around 1k$. h

Actually some PNAS papers are published completely without peer review. Members of the academy can publish a certain number of publications without going through the process. Also I recently read in a environmental health journal a study that had a n=2 with enormously low p. Which technically actually is not possible. Sometimes reviewers (especially if they do not find some specialist on the particular field) just miss obvious flaws, unfortunately.

That is true. But the same is true for PNAS (though admittedly they it is kind of an unusual journal).

It is nothing really exceptional, except that it has come to the attention of a number of news outlets. If you recall, recently there the Nobel price in chemistry was given to researchers involved in the development of GFP as a major tool in biochemistry and molecular biology. Interestingly the guy who first cloned it was left out. Instead of getting the Nobel he is a courtesy van driver. Why so? The article gives a nice spin on academic careers with a focus on Douglas Prasher, the guy who did the cloning. http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2009_02_13/caredit.a0900021 As I mentioned, these kind of things (though usually less spectacular) are commonplace in academic sciences. For the record, I am only a lowly postdoc and not a faculty member, so I do not have a good general insight into faculty matters. Except what faculty tells me, of course. Even so I have already seen a number of quite productive faculty members (equivalents to assistant professors) being forced to leave sciences after a bad streak with grants. Mind you, they were well in their 40s and their chances of getting a new tenure track were minuscule. Things are getting worse (at least in the US) for the moment as many universities have budget freezes due to financial problems. I have also known quite a number of postdocs that had trouble scoring a faculty position and being trapped in a kind of career limbo. Being a bit too old for many industrial positions and further postdocs, but not being faculty either. In the article this situation is compared to rock stars or professional sports. While I still think that the chances in sciences are still better than in either of the other careers, I would like to know what you think, based on your own experience in academic life. How do undergrads and grads see it? How about postdocs or faculty? Is your experience different (or do you think it is different)? How so? Edit: the situation is of course even more complicated for those that are from a different country as their work is additionally tied to a Visa of some sorts. Depending on the country the regulations can be quite crippling.