Biology - Science topic

Suppose we conveniently extended the standard concept of cellular automaton to include

graphs and state-spaces Q of any cardinality and that the transition function F belonged to a certain adequate notion of "(hyper)computable function". We call this a hyper-cellular automaton HCA.

Consider the postulate: the universe can be described by a HCA with transition function F.

We cannot escape the problem of the initial condition Q_0. In the Wolfram Classification random initial conditions are considered. Hence the expediency for some topology or measure on Q.

Q will include for instance the usual sheaves (principle bundles and connections) considered in the standard model. It will also include other aspects to account for quantum gravity, consciousness, emergent biological complexity, etc.

It is an empirical fact that this HCA must be WC4 "complex patterns of localised structures" in the Wolfram Classification.

A major problem is the goal of reverse engineering F is that we do not have evolutions for other initial conditions at our disposal neither for the universe nor for subsystems of the universe. For physics at least a lot of locality and invariance hypothesis come in to play to justify the universality of experimental conclusions. The chemistry we observe on earth must also be that of the most distant star.

For biology the situation is drastically different. My question is: how can biology go beyond being a merely descriptive science as contrasted with fundamental physics ?

Biology seems to be mainly a "reverse engineering" affair. But it is also important

to have detailed, mathematically precise models - perhaps using HCAs - that can be used to test hypotheses and perform simulations.

Molecular biology suggests a new paradigm for software-hardware, a fluid mobile computer with essentially interconnected parts. A key characteristic is that information operations are tied to material and energetic constraints.

Also we must focus on ecosystems (the analogue of the cell ? ) rather than individual species. What about the idea of a "natural internet" (via horizontal gene transfer, etc.) ?

Does the DNA remain stable or degrade at this temperature? Would there be any difference in thermal stability between supercoiled and linear forms of say, 3 kb plasmid.

Hello everyone,

I am running a qPCR assay. I chose gradient temperature option for each of my primer to get the best conditions the amplification happens (without heterodimers- NA in negative controls). However, I have seen that my housekeeping gene and one of my target gene have different annealing temperature. Can I run another qPCR set-up just for this gene by choosing gradient temperature option ? For instance; my gene in question in a row with 54C and housekeeping gene in a row with 60C. I think as far as the machine reads the signals at the same time, it won't pose a problem but I just want to make sure.

Many thanks,

Tuba

Which software is best for making high-quality graphs? Origin or Excel? Thank you

Hello Scholars,

I am an undergraduate at the University of Cross River State, Nigeria currently pursuing a microbiology program. For familiarity and enhanced understanding of the course, I wish to seek recommendations on the virtual/simulation laboratory software that would be very helpful to me and my colleagues. With my interest in research too, I will be pleased if a research simulator is recommended to help widen my understanding of Microbiological research.

Your recommendations would go a long way to significantly contribute to my academic career as well as my colleagues.

Thank you

I am a field biologist and especially work with birds and need a good GPS for my field work. If you could recommend one economical one and one intermediately priced one, that would be great. Thanks in advance!

Can someone can please explain how Triton causes permeabilisation of the cell membrane without causing cell contents to leak out?

Is it because my cells are fixed with pfa and that plays a role in preventing leakage of contents?

Also, how exactly does Triton work anyway, with regards to its structure affecting membrane? It is a detergent but what im understanding is it partially permeabilises membrane (not fully) otherwise whole cell would fall apart

If we take a description of the solar system in terms of Newton's equations then the solutions are time-reversible.

But many phenomena in nature are observed to be non-reversible, "dissipative", hence not having time-reversible solutions. For instance, a glass falling off the table and breaking.

The big question is: can the second law of thermodynamics be deduced from the fundamental differential equations of physics ?

Or more generally are there differential equations whose solutions are mostly entropy-increasing ?

On the other hand can we find (a system of) differential equations whose solutions are generally entropy-decreasing ? Or in which entropy-decreasing phenomena occur in relatively frequent bursts ? Differential equations which would have solutions in which the pieces spontaneously assemble into the glass on the table ?

Contemporary physics is essentially incomplete (cf. the need for dark matter, dark energy, extra dimensions, etc.). Perhaps in the complete picture entropy is actually strictly conserved. The entropy-increasing forces/fields are counterbalanced by (at present unknown) entropy-decreasing ones, in which entropy-decreasing phenomena occur in relatively frequent bursts.

Then it is this entropy-increasing aspect of nature that is the main cause of life, the cause of the relatively frequent bursts of increased self-organisation and complexity (which would then be further modulated (or "selected") by the constraints of the environment and the ecosystem).

Perhaps the "collapse of the wave-function" could be approached thermodynamically as well ?

In our diagnostic lab, we extract pure viral RNA (Qiagen viral RNA extraction kit).

Therefore, no 28S and 18S rRNA can be traced in agarose gel for total RNA integrity assesment. However, very small bands appear on gel (as seen in picture), are those 5S rRNA or other small RNA moleculea? If so, may they be correlated to total RNA integrity?

Is there any other way to asses the pure viral RNA integrity (besides Bioanalyzer)?

Thanks

Hi frds,

which animals on the planet are net-zero on negative entropies?

Is it a necesssity for survival to socialize negative entropies? Does it need some sort of animal group code to overcome animal behavior?

Cherish your feedback.

I found a species of Coniopterygidae preying on eggs and nymphs of Aleurothrixus floccosus in a lemon tree. I have followed its biology and have pictures of eggs, larvae, pupae and adults. With my thanks in advance, any help is welcome.

Luis

Which potential insect extinctions cause irreversible tipping points?

Cherish your insights.

I have noticed while reading different publications that some have used collagen to coat slide/chamber surface in fluid-flow cell experiments, while others used fibronectin. Does coating rely on the type of cells that I am going to use? Example: collagen coating for bone cells, fibronectin coating for endothelial cells?

Hi everyone, I was wondering about the possibilities of performing numerical taxonomy with SPSS software. I would be very thankful to recieve advice!! For now I have been reading about hierarchical clustering, principal component and discriminant function analysis... Help!!

I am writing a review article in biotechnology and as you know graphic images are so important in these papers. I would appreciate it if you suggest the best options. Thank you

It requires about 5.3 kcal/mol (or 8 kBT) of energy to break one phoshodiester bond of DNA. How do these enzymes cut the DNA only by using thermal energy and not ATP? I am only considering the ATP-independent restriction enzymes (Type II). How do these enzymes manage to generate the necessary energy? I couldn't find the exact mechanism with energetics of restriction enzymes cleaving DNA. Please provide me any relevant references.

Hi

The link given below is the journal list for no APC.

https://cutt.ly/xeYtYkx

(Link built by Jeysson Sánchez-Suárez)

Can anyone include more Scopus journals in Genomics, Biochemistry, Biotechnology, Microbiology, and Biology as a whole with no APC?

Thanks in advance.

Human activities have greatly changed the natural environment since the Industrial Revolution. Have migratory birds changed their migration routes? Why can migratory birds do this?

Hello everyone,

I'm an undergrad biology student from Denmark, and i work on a project with D. melanogaster. We're having a problem we can't figure out, and therefore i've created this account, hoping some of you have had the same experience with the CAFE and knows the reason.

We're feeding D. melanogaster with the Capillary Feeder Assay (CAFE) with 5 μL capillary tubes. Our problem is that after we've been feeding the flies for 24 hours or so, an air pocket starts to form in the bottom of the capillary tubes (green arrow, see attached picture), therefore making the liquid food inaccessible to the flies. The liquid food should "fall down" after the flies drinks from the capillary tubes, but instead this air pocket forms. This happens to at least 9/10 capillary tubes. The red ring (see attached picture) is how the capillary tubes should look like with liquid food and no air pocket in the bottom.

We're feeding them with 5 % sucrose and tap water in both 20 and 23 degrees Celsius.

Capillary tubes are 23 mm long and made of glass. Unknown inner or outer diameter. The capillary tubes we use: https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/DK/en/product/sigma/p1799

I hope the problem is clear and that i've provided all the necessary information

Christian

Hi, everyone i hope you are doing well.

I need some insight, as i am going to start my PhD in 2023.

I am little lost about the research as i have been not in touch with the latest growing reseach.

I did my MS research on "Endophytic Pseudomonas mediated activity against phytopathogenic fungi".

I was thinking about doing the PhD research on the similar topic but as i read literature, there have been alot of research on this topic already.

I want to ask,

1. Can i change my research field in Phd, even i have experience in different field in MS.

2. What biology field is more in scope now a days?

During the SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) coronavirus pandemic in 2020, there was a recession of the economy, the level of consumption, the scale of international transport of products, international tourism, car use, fuel and energy consumption, etc. declined.

There was then an opportunity to accelerate the processes of pro-environmental transformation of the economy, including the pro-environmental transformation of the transport sector, energy, construction, etc.

Unfortunately, this opportunity was not seized. As a consequence of these omissions, the subsequent economic and energy crises will be deeper than if the necessary transformation of the energy sector, which is being implemented through the development of renewable and emission-free energy sources, had been carried out in the past.

As a result, the global warming process continues to accelerate and progress faster than even the earlier IPCC reports published a few years ago and earlier.

One of the negative consequences of the continuing process of global warming is the loss of biodiversity of natural ecosystems.

I would therefore like to ask the following question:

What do you think?

What is your opinion on the subject?

What do you think about this issue?

Please reply,

I invite you all to discuss,

Thank you very much,

Best regards,

Dariusz Prokopowicz

The phrase in the Title line imitates Karl Popper’s All Life is Problem Solving.

Since thermodynamics plays a role in life processes, it was surprising that searching “All life is thermodynamics” on Google on August 16, 2022 gave no results.

Don’t organisms seek to optimize and preserve the entropy of their internal energy distribution? And to optimize their use of energy and outcomes based on energy inputs? Aren’t survival and procreation ways of preserving previous products of energy use?

Is there justification for the statement, All life is thermodynamics? Or is the statement too simple to convey any insight?

Schrodinger in What is Life referred to thermodynamics, statistical mechanics; chapter 6 is Order, Disorder and Entropy. And more recently there is: J. Chem. Phys. 139, 121923 (2013); doi: 10.1063/1.4818538 Statistical physics of self-replication by Jeremy England.

I'm searching for a good collaborator or a research group that might want to tackle an interesting problem involving the relationship between quantum dots generating nanoparticle clusters and their DNA/proteins corral. This relationship is encapsulated by geometric proximity, that is I'm looking for someone who might know how quantum mechanics impacts something like these nanoparticles, such as how close a nanoparticle is to another nanoparticle or a protein and whether sized clusters form. Ping me if you're in the bio sciences, computational biology, chemistry, biology or physical sciences and think you might be able to shed some light on the above.

Currently, in Japan, physics, chemistry, biology, and geology are taught independently in science education context. So I would like to know, has any country developed a curriculum that emphasizes the relationship or overlaps between these four fields? I know that similar movement is occurring under the name of "STEM integration." But how about the case of physics, chemistry, biology, and geology? (Or I should say "PCBG integration") I would appreciate it if you could let me know anything.

Olen R.Brown & David A.Hullender published a paper in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology journal in August 2022 with the name ( Neo-Darwinism must Mutate to survive ) : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079610722000347

the writers doubt macroevolution or the ability of known mechanisms of evolution to explain macroevolution as they say :

The central focus of this perspective is to provide evidence to document that selection based on survival of the fittest is insufficient for other than microevolution. Realistic probability calculations based on probabilities associated with microevolution are presented. However, macroevolution (required for all speciation events and the complexifications appearing in the Cambrian explosion) are shown to be probabilistically highly implausible (on the order of 10−50) when based on selection by survival of the fittest. We conclude that macroevolution via survival of the fittest is not salvageable by arguments for random genetic drift and other proposed mechanisms.

I do recognise that there’s a well-known problem (hard though it is) of establishing how consciousness emerges or can be accounted for in physical processes. But I can’t at all agree that there’s a naturalistic, absolute hard problem of consciousness, because it’s an incoherent concept.

Nobody (at least nobody with a clue) supposes that neurophysiology can explain a qualitative difference in the way you and I experience the content of my music mix playing quietly in the background, or see the light reflect off a rainbow, or any of the other ways in which our qualitative experience discriminates from that of other live organisms. To suppose that just because you don’t know the mechanisms of the experience in your own head you will deny them the existence of them in somebody else’s is bizarre and reductionist.

Construct an imaginary metaphor of a magical, wizardry, thing-maker consciousness and you haven’t explained the qualitative data there either. It’s still the question of how consciousness comes into the work whether any magical things happen or whether there’s anybody there at all. To suppose a separate, inexplicable, mysterious, magic ingredient does neither any explanatory good, solve the hard problem, nor explain the evidence. All such arguments for a separate consciousness occurrent substance do, again, be it a magic nonsense or magic substance involved, reduce the hard problem of explaining thisness-of-consciousness (to pick a crazy approach) to the very same hard problem of explaining how consciousness arises in the first place.

If you identify the hard problem entirely with the mechanism through which the feeling-of-redness arises, or "the feeling of the future in an invariant past", or anything else you allude to, then you plainly have just traded in one way of asking a very simple question of the wrong approach. The question is, how do the millions of biological chunks and sub-systems interact with one another and integrate information over time and space? The sense of sight, sound, touch and soil all raise a “hard problem” of projection-understanding and categories-beyond-the-reliable-input-enumeration because by a vast over-engineering of the metaphor arms race (as even you must agree) the response-device signals of a single kind of appropriate examination will allow all in-the-know people to interpret an external reality quite differently. But the “hard problem” isn’t WHY is it that we can punch those signals at all, or make sense of the signals that come out the other end. That’s just the default condition of our very real neurological symposium. Whereas the “humanness” of that experience is also an entirely benignly apparent phenomenon, just as water’s polar nature is an entirely benignly apparentity.

For me the cardinal point is to reckon with how we perceive our own subjective value via multi-sensory data input both direct and indirect in both our two and three dimensional waking experience. And because at the very least you have to be wrong or qualified immensely if you think it’s not merely the interaction between general anatomy, organisation, information processing and output of your brain and all subjective processes such that personal conclusions then magically appear as relevant claims about reality.

P.S. I don't think evolution throws up any magical consciousness, either on its petri-dish experiments, or those novelty subjectiveness media that it comes up with sometimes. So I'd like to challenge that viewpoint, particularly in terms of our understanding of the nuances.

Globally, deforestation processes continue to outpace aforestation processes.It is well known that forests are one of the key influences on the climate, on the stability and sustainability of the climate, the maintenance of a humid microclimate, local water management, the state of biodiversity in regions.

Forests are also one of the key factors in reducing the amount of CO2 entering the atmosphere. At the UN climate summit COP26, it was agreed that by the end of this decade, i.e. by the end of 2030, national and global forest deforestation processes should be completed and forest afforestation processes should be accelerated. The restoration of forest ecosystems should be carried out in accordance with the principles of ecology of specific environmental formations of forest ecosystems consisting of replacing monocultures of tree crops with biodiverse restored, tree-rich forest ecosystem formations adequate to the specific local environment, geological and climatic setting.

What do you think about it?

What is your opinion on this topic?

Please reply,

I invite everyone to the discussion,

Thank you very much,

Kind regards,

Dariusz

Forests are the biodiversity wealth of natural ecosystems and a key factor in the wealth of the planet's biosphere. However, this natural wealth is rapidly being eroded by human civilisational activities. The scale of forest fires has been increasing in recent years. The increasing scale of forest fires is a result of the ongoing process of global warming. In some regions of the world, forests are also being burned in order to acquire more land for the cultivation of agricultural crops, which is usually carried out under predatory and unsustainable farming practices. It is well known that forests are one of the key factors in reducing the rate of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, an important factor in slowing down the greenhouse effect and consequently also in slowing down global warming. It is therefore essential to increase the scale of forest fire protection.

The following questions are therefore becoming increasingly topical:

What is your opinion on this subject?

What do you think about this topic?

Please reply,

I invite you all to discuss,

Thank you very much,

Regards,

Dariusz

A patient with desminopathy survived Covid-19 six months ago without pneumonia, but with a temporary loss of smell and taste. After Covid-19, we note an accelerated progression of desminopathy, penetration accelerates, new muscles are quickly involved in the pathological process, muscle mass decreases, and heart function worsens. Perhaps the infection or its consequences are somehow connected with the mechanism of progression of desminopathy?

To save life in desminopathy, can the body purposefully reduce muscle mass, for example, due to decreased heart function or for another reason?

It is known that when hypothermia, the body sacrifices limbs for survival. Is it possible with desminopathy a similar phenomenon?

A patient with desminopathy (mutation Thr341Pro DES in a heterozygous state) with the progression of the disease has a decrease in taste and smell, immunosuppression, and an increase in IgA in the blood.

Oddly enough, but all this is characteristic of infections, including viral ones. For example, it is known that if the hepatitis C virus is not treated, then death will occur in 20 years.

In the identified case of late onset desminopathy, muscle weakness manifests itself at the age of 30, and death occurs 20 years after the onset of the disease.

Hello!

I was wondering if anyone could point me to any references that show that with increasing oligo length, there is a significant reduction in ssDNA generation efficiency. Im specifically curious at what point heating to separate dsDNA becomes ineffective and some sort of legitimate physical experiment to quantify this reduction with increasing DNA length.

Hi

Some authors use either correlation matrices or VIF to identify collinearity between variables, while others apply both to improve model performance and interpretability. Therefore, I would be happy to get statistical explanations from anyone about the tools used separately and simultaneously or I want to know if other robust mechanisms to check collinearity are extant.

Thank you in advance!

I just received this email from Peer Review Department from "Insights in Biology and Medicine" Journal.

I think that this journal is not indexed.

Here is the email:

Dear Dr. Hany Mansour,

In the view of your eminence in the field, we kindly request you to review a manuscript from the Insights in Biology and Medicine.

This is to bring to your kind notice that we have received a manuscript entitled "Dead Sea Salt Solution: composition, lack of cytotoxicity and in vitro efficacy against oral leukotoxins, endotoxins, and glucansucrase"

We believe that your expertise and experience in the subject matter will certainly help in enhancing the quality of the manuscript.

We request you to accept this manuscript for review purpose and send the comments in the stipulated date.

Please find the attachments of the manuscript and Evaluation form.

Your support will be highly appreciated in publishing the research and development works in Open Access.

Best compliments,

Lisa

Peer-Review Department

Good day,

i have a general question about tissue culture.

I have found the following recipe for Epipremnum Aureum "Marble Queen":

Leaf Explant: MS Medium + 4.54 µM TDZ + 1.07 µM NAA (Thidiazuron in Micropropagation of Aroid Plants by Chen and Wei (2018), p. 105, DOI: 10.1007/978-981-10-8004-3_4)

Specifically, I have the following questions.

1) Do i only need to autoclave the agar with distilled water (I use a pressure cooker for this) and when the agar has cooled down a bit just add the MS, TDZ and NAA and mix it or do i need to autoclave the MS as well?

2) Will the TDZ dissolve in the agar water at all and how hot can the agar water be to add the MS, TDZ and NAA?

3) Is it even necessary to autoclave the water incl. agar (in the pressure cooker) if I clean all the jars with NaClO (sodium hypochlorite)?

Thank you in advance!

I'm using Sporosarcina pasteurii to remove heavy metals from wastewater by producing metal carbonates. The issue I encounter is that high metal concentrations (i.e. Co 2g/L) strongly inhibit bacterial growth and activity.

One of the existing solutions is to isolate another already metal-tolerant strain (such as Lysinibacillus sphaericus). (source :

I have read that it is possible to adapt a bacterial culture to a high concentration of metals by serial acclimatisation, where the bacteria are successively grown in a medium of increasing metal concentration. (source : 10.1016/j.wasman.2018.07.010)

Can this method be adapted to ureolytic bacteria? Are there any examples?

If not, what other methods would you suggest?

Thank you !!

"The general notion of an “RNA World” is that, in the early development of life on the Earth, genetic continuity was assured by the replication of RNA and genetically encoded proteins were not involved as catalysts. There is now strong evidence indicating that an RNA World did indeed exist before DNA- and protein-based life. However, arguments regarding whether life on Earth began with RNA are more tenuous. It might be imagined that all of the components of RNA were available in some prebiotic pool and that these components assembled into replicating, evolving polynucleotides without the prior existence of any evolved macromolecules. A thorough consideration of this “RNA-first” view of the origin of life must reconcile concerns regarding the intractable mixtures that are obtained in experiments designed to simulate the chemistry of the primitive Earth. Perhaps these concerns will eventually be resolved, and recent experimental findings provide some reason for optimism. However, the problem of the origin of the RNA World is far from being solved, and it is fruitful to consider the alternative possibility that RNA was preceded by some other replicating, evolving molecule, just as DNA and proteins were preceded by RNA." - Robertson and Joyce

[This is as per the explanation by Michael P Robertson and Gerald F Joyce in the article: "The origins of the RNA world." published in the Cold Spring Harb. Perspect. Biol. 4, a003608 (2012).]

I am a student of biotechnology and an independent SARS CoV-2 researcher from India. For finding the academia research status and analysis of the integration of innovation with research, I have created a set of Multiple choice type questions about your experience as a researcher. The google form requires nothing but your honesty and openness for research. Feel free to ask questions and DM. The questions will assist in gauging the level of innovation and writing in academia.

If possible, please do forward this little form to your fellow researchers and other amazing scientists. I would be highly grateful.

https://forms.gle/cufB7Uc6BgYQe9Xa8

Thank you

Hi,

I wonder if anyone knows how to use sample release reagent from Sansure Biotech ?

The 2023 ranking is available through the following link:

QS ranking is relatively familiar in scientific circles. It ranks universities based on the following criteria:

1- Academic Reputation

2- Employer Reputation

3- Citations per Faculty

4- Faculty Student Ratio

5- International Students Ratio

6- International Faculty Ratio

7- International Research Network

8- Employment Outcomes

- Are these parameters enough to measure the superiority of a university?

- What other factors should also be taken into account?

Please share your personal experience with these criteria.

I was able to study biology but not enough to understand the difference between B-phycoerythrin and R-phycoerythrin. Quite "simply" could someone answer to this question? Can we switch from one form to another? :)

Hello everyone:

Like Darwin reading Malthus "for amusement", I've been reading the 2nd chapter, "Systematics and Evolution", of the 3rd edition of "Vertebrate Biology", by Donald W. Linzey (2020).

When reading the section on "Species and Speciation" in this chapter, and more specifically when reading about the founder effect and its relationship with the origin of new species, I found the following sentence: "(...) speciation can proceed rapidly since only a portion of the original gene pool is normally present in the small, newly relocated population, and NATURAL SELECTION CAN WORK MORE QUICKLY ON SMALLER GENE POOLS" (capital letters are mine).

To the best of my knowledge, mathematical models of natural selection include parameters like relative fitness and/or selection coefficients, whereas population size is included in models for the evolutionary effects of random genetic drift.

So, do you have any idea on the reasons why natural selection could go faster in small populations (i.e., small gene pools)?

Any help will be welcome. Best regards, and thanks in advance:

Jose.

Hi! I am a 3rd year biology student, and currently working on my undergraduate thesis, which has an objective to determine the presence of metallothioneins on several candidates from different microalgae genera. But, I don't have a background on various bioinformatics tool, may I ask if you know any software that could possible help me achieve my study's motive? Thank you

If I wanted to introduce a foreign protein into the human stomach without it getting cleaved up by proteases such as trypsin, how would I do so?

Complex systems are becoming one of very useful tools in the description of observed natural phenomena across all scientific disciplines. You are welcomed to share with us hot topics from your own area of research.

Nowadays, no one can encompass all scientific disciplines. Hence, it would be useful to all of us to know hot topics from various scientific fields.

Discussion about various methods and approaches applied to describe emergent behavior, self-organization, self-repair, multiscale phenomena, and other phenomena observed in complex systems are highly encouraged.

In my previous question I suggested using the Research Gate platform to launch large-scale spatio temporal comparative researches.

The following is the description of one of the problems of pressing importance for humanitarian and educational sectors.

For the last several decades there has been a gradual loss in quality of education on all its levels . We can observe that our universities are progressively turning into entertaining institutions, where students parties, musical and sport activities are valued higher than studying in a library or working on painstaking calculations.

In 1998 Vladimir Arnold (1937 – 2010), one of the greatest mathematicians of our times, in his article “Mathematical Innumeracy Scarier Than Inquisition Fires” (newspaper “Izvestia”, Moscow) stated that the power players didn’t need all the people to be able to think and analyze, only “cogs in machines,” serving their interests and business processes. He also wrote that American students didn’t know how to sum up simple fractions. Most of them sum up numerator and denominators of one simple fraction with the ones of the other, i.e. as they did it, 1/2+ 1/3 according to their understand is equal to 2/5 . Vladimir Arnold pointed out that with this kind of education, students can’t think, prove and reason – they are easy to turn into a crowd, to be easily manipulated by cunning politicians because they don’t usually understand causes and effects of political acts. I would add, for myself, that this process is quite understandable and expected because computers, internet and consumer society lifestyle (with its continuous rush for more and newer commodities we are induced to regard as a healthy behavior) have wiped off young people’s skills in elementary logic and eagerness to study hard. And this is exactly what the consumer economics and its bosses, the owners of international businesses and local magnates, need.

I recall a funny incident that happened in Kharkov (Ukraine). One Biology student was asked what “two squared” was. He answered that it was the number 2 inscribed into a square.

The level and the scale of education and intellectual decline described can be easily measured with the help of the Research Gate platform. It could be appropriate to test students’ logic abilities, instead of guess-the-answer tests which have taken over all the universities within the framework of Bologna Process which victorious march on the territories of former Soviet states. Many people can remember the fact that Soviet education system was one of the best in the world. I have therefore suggested the following tests:

1. In a Nikolai Bogdanov-Belsky (1868-1945) painting “Oral accounting at Rachinsky's People's school”(1895) one could see boys in a village school at a mental arithmetic lesson. Their teacher, Sergei Rachinsky (1833-1902), the school headmaster and also a professor at the Moscow University in the 1860s, offered the children the following exercise to do a mental calculation (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BogdanovBelsky_UstnySchet.jpg?uselang=ru):

(10 х 10 + 11 х 11 + 12 х 12 + 13 х 13 + 14 х 14) / 365 = ?

(there is no provision here on Research Gate to write square of the numbers,thats why I have writen through multiplication of the numbers )

19th century peasant children with basted shoes (“lapti”) were able to solve such task mentally. This year, in September, this very exercise was given to the senior high school pupils and the first year students of a university with major in Physics and Technology in Kyiv (the capital of Ukraine) and no one could solve it.

2. Exercise of a famous mathematician Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855): to calculate mentally the sum of the first one hundred positive integers:

1+2+3+4+…+100 = ?

3. Albrecht Dürer’s (1471-1528) magic square (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_square)

The German Renaissance painter was amazed by the mathematical properties of the magic square, which were described in Europe firstly in Spanish (the 1280s) and Italian (14th century) manuscripts. He used the image of the square as a detail for in his Melancholia I painting , which was drawn in 1514, and included the numbers 15 and 14 in his magic square:

16 3 2 13

5 10 11 8

9 6 7 12

4 15 14 1

Ask your students to find regularities in this magic square. In case this exercise seems hard, you can offer them Lo Shu (2200 BC) square, a simpler variant of magic square of the third order (minimal non-trivial case):

4 9 2

3 5 7

8 1 6

4. Summing up of simple fractions.

According to Vladimir Arnold’s popular articles, in the era of computers and Internet, this test becomes an absolute obstacle for more and more students all over the world. Any exercises of the following type will be appropriate at this part:

3/7 + 7/3 = ? and 5/6 + 7/15=?

I think these four tests will be enough. All of them are for logical skills, unlike the tests created under Bologna Process.

Dear colleagues, professors and teachers,

You can offer these tasks to the students at your colleges and universities and share the results here, at the Research Gate platform, so that we all can see the landscape of the wretchedness and misery resulted from neoliberal economics and globalization.

Every time i working with hyaluronic acid I got some bubbles inside gel. It desn't matter in lab and do not affect on the acid. Few days ago I saw syringe (with a needle) with clear hyaluronic acid without any bubbles. Friend send me a photo of bottle with the product without bubbles too. How do they made it??? I was trying vacuum suction but did not get proper effect.

Hello everyone, any system can be thought of as a collection of its fundamental building blocks. There are well defined fundamental parts in certain systems (attached image) like the basis vectors for a vector space or the 5 fundamental tastes. Then there are systems where the fundamental parts aren't as well defined but we can still think of the best candidate parts for such systems. For example,

Which principal or fundamental parts can be thought of as the building blocks of fruits and vegetables? I can think of a few:

Can we come up with a master list of all possible principal components which are the bare minimum to construct any fruit or vegetable?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A rephrasing of the question to make it a bit clearer:

Imagine you have the power to create any fruit/vegetable out of thin air (F&Vman). What minimum amount of data would you need to make a specific fruit/vegetable with your power? (let's use apple as an example for the discussion)

You want to earn a living by doing this so you wish to standardize the process. For that, you need an exact list of basic/fundamental characteristics of F&V (both, regarding their physicality and their chemical make-up) from your customers that can be used to make almost any, if not all, F&V.

That list is what I'm looking for.

Compiled allometric data might help to detect scaling patterns.

Or similarities in the scaling relationships might suggest connections otherwise too subtle to find.

Does such a list exist?

Does such a list exist for biological phenomena?

If such lists do not exist should they?

Hello everyone,

I need help understanding whether my two groups are paired or not.

I am collecting data from one group of cells. We have developed two different workflows (let's call them A, and B) for data analysis. We want to test whether these two workflows give the 'same' results for the same set of cells.

At the end, I obtain:

I have been considering the two groups as independent because the two workflows do not interfere with each other. However, the fact that both workflows operate on the same cells is throwing me off and I am wondering if these groups are actually paired.

Could you advise me on this and on what test is best to use?

The hypothesis for the test would be:

Thank you.

GN

Over the last few months, I have come across several posts on social media where scientists/researchers even Universities are flaunting their ranking as per AD Scientific Index https://www.adscientificindex.com/.

When I clicked on the website, I was surprised to discover that they are charging a fee (~24-30 USD) to add the information of an individual researcher.

So I started wondering if it's another scam of ‘predatory’ rankings.

Dear friends, I am a master's student in biology. Now I need to added drug to the medium after being diluted into PBS. How much PBS can be added to the medium without affecting the cell growth. The medium I use is DMEM and 10% serums

Example:

1. You use Material 1 in Biology and after using it, you recycle it in Chemistry to come up with Material 2.

2. You use Material 1 in Biology and then its product is used in Chemistry, Physics, Earth Science.

3. Or any related activities that make use of similar or related ideas.

If you can share also your related studies, I highly appreciate it. Thanks!

Like I want to prepare a senior secondary Biology Subject curriculum block for instruction.

I need the block format, the contents examples etc

As far as I know it has been dismissed as a closed cased of the history of science having no defenders left. However, that's not the feeling I get when the issue comes up in private discussions. I'm wondering if I have missed something, and if and how vitalism (or some refined modern form of it) is still considered to be a viable option by some biologists?

Most biologists and philosophers understand vitalism as the doctrine of the entelechy, originally proposed by the German biologist Hans Driesch in the early twentieth century. According to Driesch, entelechies were nonmaterial, bio-specific agents responsible for governing a few peculiar biological phenomena. Current attitudes towards vitalism and the doctrine of the entelechy are almost universally negative. Numerous biologists and philosophers today endorse this metaphysical refutation of vitalism. For them, since all events and processes in the world, from the metaphysical point of view, must be identical or reducible to some material (or physical) events and processes, there is no room for nonmaterial agents such as entelechies. The addition of the information instead of the concept of entelechy will change the perspective on vitalism.,

Hello,

my name is Carolin Fischer, a sociology student from the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. I am currently writing my Bachelor's Thesis in the field of Cultural and Environmental Sociology. As this will be a qualitative study on environmental topics I am looking for interview partners, who work (or used to work) in the field of environmental and climate change research. The interviews will be held via video chat either in German or English.

If you're interested in being interviewed and in helping me with my thesis please feel free to contact me via Research Gate or mail: fischer.carolin@uni-jena.de

Thank you and kind regards,

Carolin

Can you please suggest what could be the possible reasons for the confirmation of only 4 out of 13 genes (by qPCR), not all 13? Have anyone observed the same ChIP-qPCR validation issues? Any PubMed suggestion would be great. Thank you for your help in advance.

For thinking - in regard to overtaking "believes, dogmas"

Blind adoption of believes, dogmas by people in populations (Psychology of the Crowd, by Gustave Le Bon) seems to be psychologically coupled and physically from a social scientific point of view explainable:

here, too, synchronization within masses occurs

- and it seems also in accordance to the Kuramoto model.

For this, only a corresponding marketing strategy, seems to be necessary (applied maths / physics).

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Basis:  Yoshiki Kuramoto assumed in 1975 that there is a weak relationship (better coupling) of oscillating systems (oscillators) and that these are almost identical. Kuramoto found that mathematically between each pair of coupled oscillators, their interaction is sinusoidally dependent on the respective phase difference, resulting into the so-called *Kuramoto Model* This even can be illustrated using initially non-synchronous metronomes, which in the course (under certain conditions: moveable surface) synchronize themselves.

This even seems a basic model in nature, biology, chemistry, physics and/or social sciences: – synchronizing of coupled systems:

– collective flasing of fireflies [Buck 1988]

– collective oscillation of pancreatic beta cells [Sherman 1991]

– the heartbeat synchronized with ventilation [Schäfer 1998]

– pedestrian induced oscillations on bridges [Strogatz 2005]

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References

-Kuramoto, Yoshiki (1975) Self-entrainment of a population of coupled non-linear oscillators. In: Araki H (eds.) International Symposium on Mathematical Problems in Theoretical Physics, Lecture Notes in Physics, Volume 39, Springer-Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg. DOI: 10.1007/BFb0013365.

-Buck J (1988) Synchronous rhythmic flashing of fireflies, IIi. Q Rev Biol (63)3), 265–289. DOI: 10.1086/415929.

-Sherman A, Rinzel J (1991) Model for synchronization of pancreatic betacells by gap junction coupling. Biophysical journal 59(3), 547–559. DOI: 10.1016/S0006-3495(91)82271-8.

-Schäfer C, Rosenblum MG, Kurths J, Abel HH (1998) Heartbeat synchronized with ventilation, Nature 392(6673), 239–240. DOI: 10.1038/32567.

-Strogatz SH, Abrams DM, McRobie A, Eckhardt B, Ott E (2005) Theoretical mechanics: Crowd synchrony on the millennium bridge, Nature 438(7064), 43–44. DOI: 10.1038/43843a.

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Credit 'spontaneous synchronization of metronomes' video

https://bit.ly/3IdjYkA

#psychology #synchronization #nature #physics #chemistry #biology

Yesterday I have read a news stating that The embryo fossil, nicknamed “Baby Yingliang,” was discovered in Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province in southern China, and is believed to be at least 66 million years old. Researcher Dr. Fion Waisum Ma told the AFP news agency that the discovery is “the best dinosaur embryo ever found in history” (globalnews, 2021).

Although there were several discoveries of Dinosaur components such as:

Eggs

DNAs from thier remains

are frequently being discovered, Since the biotechnology development is in its Zenith at 2022, Why nobody has attempted to create a dinosaur?

I consider doing research relating biomechanics to the quality of food people eat, but the methodology to access what people eat seems a strong limitation. Questionnaires/surveys seem to be the way, but the accuracy of the information may be questionable, and the reported habits may not necessarily explain the current biology of the cohort. How do you all approach investigating the quality/quantity of food intake?

I'm curious to know your thoughts!

Dear colleagues, our lab is having a new project in synovial fluid processing. We need filtered from all the cells SF.

Does anyone have experience in filtering the SF sample through 0.22 um filters? If it is possible to isolate the cells and keep them (maybe in case of filtering via a vacuum system, not via just syringe and filter).

One more question: what is your typical protocol to get synovial fluid cells spun?

Best regards,

Mariia, PhD in Biology, Ukraine

Hi Academics,

Kindly could you clarify the meaning of the term " Researcher"?

Best.