CharonY

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.

10 Make some good coffee 20 Worry about everything over the coffee 30 Drink coffee 40 Goto 10 Applies to any situation, including zombie infestation.

Well our opinion in restriction the dissemination of our results should be pretty obvious, shouldn't it? I assume the point the publishers make is not that they own the research data, but rather the finalized paper. You are essentially free to post your data all over the net (once it has been published) but woe you if you post the article as a whole somewhere. Truth is, of course that many people do regardless and that this kind of copyright violation is rarely, if ever, persecuted. I have no idea how likely it is that this bill will pass, but given the fact that quite a number of the big science journals allow the authors to at least make their unedited manuscript publicly available (even though sometimes with as much as a 6 month delay) it does not really reflect the science publishing reality anymore. Even if the NIH is not allowed to force you to put your paper in Pubmed Central, many journals will allow you to do so. And not allowing you to propagate you results will harm the journal itself in the long run (due to declining impact factors).

To be honest the article looks a bit like a hoax to me. Even the simple experiment of making bacteria express GFP would require more than described in the article. Not even considering the high probability of failure if they had the equipment at home. Edit: Ok it appears she is actually serious about it. However her approach is flawed. While it is not a bad idea, she actually requires a promoter region as well as regulators that react to melamine instead of the protein that actually degrades it. This is because expression is usually not directly controlled by the enzyme itself. While I kind of like that idea it also shows that one needs a bit more info that you get on the web to makes something work. Also careless use of resistance carrying plasmids in the household may allow an even faster spread of resistances than what is already happening (in the lab you autoclave everything before you dispose it). Regarding the project in the OP. as Mokele pointed out, there is hardly a way to ascertain which manipulation would actually result in a growth increase. That basically rules out targeted genetic manipulations.

I do not want to complicate matters, but some bacterial consortia can utilize methane under anaerobic conditions (yes, I have been around microbiologists for too long).

Guess this thread is going down towards copyright discussions. But I'd like a coffee, too. But as we are already OT: some journals actually have the authors sign over the copyrights to them. A couple of years back it was quite customary only to be allowed to send reprints of your own paper (which kind of now belongs to the journal) that you (as author) have bought beforehand. Good thing that this has changed for most journals (at least those that I have published in).

I had a discussion with an Italian colleague on this and he was pretty sure (and apparently it was also discussed that way in Italian newspapers) that Berlusconi used this as a test run to extend his powers by issuing fast-track decrees. If this decree is upheld one is expect to see more suchalikes in the future. And the sad thing is that everyone knows that he is a crook and yet they elected him...

jorge, yes, I mistranslated the German word. However, check the OP. 10 survivors are indicated there. In his subsequent post he erroneously compared the original numbers E. coli with those of S. aureus.

Generally in these cases the running conditions are not stringent enough (e.g. buffer, too low annealing temp, too many cycles etc.). Or there are DNA contaminations.

Actually you are not as the peer reviewers do not get paid either. The only things that take money are the editorial staff, editing, and publishing itself. Regardless whether it is open access or not, the author has to pay for the publication (the highest cost I had was around 5000$). But in any case, it is unfortunately in their power to restrict dissemination (which is especially frustrating for the author). It is good that many open source journals (which sometimes are pretty expensive to publish in, though) are rising in their impact.

Off-topic: Why is Einstein's name so often misspelled?

Italy went downhill since Berlusconi and his cronies decided to try out politics (according to my Italian colleagues-- weird enough I have more European colleagues here than in Germany, excluding Germans, of course.).

Ack I noticed that I was still ambiguous. The ratio you get is the percentage of survivors. To get the kill rate you will have of course to subtract that value from 100%. I suppose that is what you calculated above but the value should be even higher. That is another reason why often the logs are used. Something like 99.995% suggests a higher accuracy than the test could possibly give. Looking at the log distances gives a better idea.

Nope. I may have phrased it wrongly. Initial bacteria in this case are the bacteria in your untreated control (the amount that live without bamboo kun). (190000) and the survivors are those that still live after treatment (10). So it is 10/190000*100.

I have not heard from bamboo kun before but from what I read it is supposed to be a bacteriostaticum. That is, it prevents bacterial growth, but does not actively kill. Based on that it is kind of weird that the titer is going down after 24 hours. So according to this result it rally killed bacteria. To get the percentage you need simply to calculate: (surviving bacteria/initial bacteria)*100. The antimicrobial activity is simply another way of easily expressing this ratio. Here the difference of the log10 values before and after treatment is indicated. It is a simplification because the titers are usually so high that it is easier to operate with log values.

Indeed. I recall a documentary about a British Airways flight that went through volcano ash which subsequently killed all engines of the 747. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_9 Actually the whole appeared to be extremely calm regarding the circumstances. Although, they had the advantage of being British.

mrsemmapeel, could you please remove the attachment from your post? It is unlikely that someone from the journal will notice this, but it really should not be done in an open thread.

For the integration of electrolysis into the car thing I would assume that normal cars would simply be too small for a electrolysis plus compression system. At least none that would generate meaningful amounts.

Actually they are around already. I read an article of a couple of those in northern Europe and Japan. They are not terribly cheap though. One needs to generate the hydrogen, compress it, etc. Another problem is that in case of using electricity to generate hydrogen, one is again dependent on either fossil fuels or nuclear plants to satisfy the energy need. According to one calculation such a station would need roughly 3-57 MW to serve 100-2000 cars per day. Given this data it is likely that there is hesitation to set up a net of such stations as it is not clear whether the system is sustainable or not.

Hmm never used that company before.

In eukaryotes the chromatids consist of a single DNA molecule. So if it is unreplicated it corresponds to the number of chromosomes, but after the S phase the the chromsome consists of two sister-chromatids, so the number of chromsomes remain the same, yet the number of DNA molecule doubles (one for each chromatid). Edit: In prokaryotes one chromosome always consists of a single DNA molecule. Mostly circular, but there are exceptions.

How large is the lamp? If it ain't that big you could really spin-coat a smallish plate with that and still cover it. //edit: apparently my already low writing abilities have been gone to hell completely. Guess sleep is not that much overrated after all.

Well, while that is true one has to add that your PhD will be granted from a specific faculty (or grad school whatever it is properly called here). So you would get a PhD in, say, engineering. However this is less limiting as you may believe because if your research subject fits what is needed, than it does not matter where you came from. Also many companies stress that they do not seek the perfect fit in terms of qualifications, but rather someone that can actually fit into their system. Which makes sense as relatively few PhDs later on really are continuing to be in the lab (for the monkey deal reasons mentioned above. Only the academia does actually pay PhDs with peanuts).

Funny, here almost all biochemistry classes are given by chemists, which means the biology is often skipped or wrong or jumbled . But in any case, I have a couple of former colleagues joining the pharmaceutical industry. They majority of them are in R and D and one is in sales. There is however, no clear cut study course that will secure a position. If you are going into organic chemistry but make your PhD in a drug related field you are as likely (or more likely) to get a job as researcher (or rather group leader) as a biochemist doing the analytical stuff. It depends on what the company is doing (whether they are doing drug research, drug delivery, production of generics and so on). But classically one should have a strong background in analytical chemistry (you can demonstrate this with a proper chemistry, biochemistry or biology background). As a group leader usually (but not always) a PhD is required and then again ideally your work is related to what they are doing (e.g. pharmacokinetics, polymer science or whatever). From what I have heard though, few companies actually are actively recruiting people for the development of completely novel drugs. What is more common is that there is already data on a drug and that they are doing the validation steps. What the group leader would be doing is not to make the whole basic research stuff, but set everything up so that all necessary studies (as defined by the FDA) are fulfilled. Pure (basic) research positions are comparatively rare (they exist, of course but are much rarer). Often they directly buy a basic idea, from academia for instance, and proceed from there. And many companies are not doing drug development at all but rather focus on improvement of drug delivery, for instance.