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1500 questions
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2 answers
Why does the chance of having a baby with Down's syndrome increase with the age of the mother?
Down's syndrome occurs when either the egg or the sperm cell contain on extra chromosome 21. To my understanding, women are born with all the egg cells in place already, so there's no further cell divisions, and thus no further chance of having one…
mart
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Is it safe to look at infrared LEDs?
What happens if one looks directly at infrared LEDs? Sometimes I see this kind of LED at night as red dots and I'm also courious about it.
I was wondering what would happen if one looks directly to these LEDs, because we see them everywhere like in…
Vladimir
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12
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Why, specifically, does each generation, on average, improve upon the design of the species rather than degrade it?
In every non-life example I can envision, a copy of a copy is always a degraded or less pure version of the original unless some outside influence acts to correct the copy back toward the ideal represented by the original. Photocopies get blurrier…
Mark Bailey
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Do white Australians have a distinct look?
Background
I've heard from many people working in tourism or similar industries that, white Australians can be recognized as Australian solely by their facial features. Being Australian myself I've heard variants of the claim quite often and lean…
Sonny Ordell
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How to reduce edge effects in cell-based high-throughput experiments?
In high-throughput experiments where cells are cultured, treated, stained, and imaged in 384-well microplates, I frequently see significant edge effects. For instance, the following plot shows cell count (as measured by CellProfiler from images) for…
Vebjorn Ljosa
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12
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Can I elute my GFP-tagged protein off anti-GFP antibody using a peptide?
I would like to perform a modified co-immunoprecipitation assay using a GFP-tagged protein. We are going to bind the tagged protein to anti-GFP antibody then bind that to protein A/G beads, however we want to be able to selectively elute the tagged…
Emlena.PhD
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12
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Antibacterial hand soaps (and related products); what are they good for?
From Wikipedia:
Household use of antibacterials in soaps and other products, although not clearly contributing to resistance, is also discouraged (as not being effective at infection control).
Following the links led me to this paper: Larson EL,…
Douglas S. Stones
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What is a fungus formally?
Fungi are immotile eukaryotes that do not have chloroplasts or perform photosynthesis. Yet there are other organisms that fit this definition that are not fungi, for example slime molds. What is the formal definition of a fungus? Wiktionary,…
imrobert
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Identify blue/translucent jelly-like animal on beach
A few weeks back a beach in California had lots of this animal (if it is an animal?). Can anyone identify what it is?
They had a distinct blue bottom and a see-through top.
JenserCube
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Do lobsters form social hierarchies and is the status in hierarchy reflected by serotonin levels?
In his book 12 rules for life Jordan Peterson claims that:
Consider serotonin, the chemical that governs posture and escape in the lobster. Low-
ranking lobsters produce comparatively low levels of serotonin. This is also true of low-
ranking human…
CuriousIndeed
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How deep under water can humans open their naked eyes without damaging them?
Humans can tolerate a maximum pressure of 100atm, but it becomes uncomfortable above 30 atms. Deep divers usually wear protective equipment like goggles among other things and our eyes seem to be more fragile than the rest of our body.
So, without…
Aditya Kumar Panda
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1 answer
Would fewer cows mean less methane emission?
Rotting grass produces the same amount of methane as cows that digest grass (see this source). So if cows did not eat the grass, it would still emit methane. Therefore, if there were fewer cows, would the total methane emission change at all?
Riemann
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Genetic expression in interspecific hybrids
Referring to interspecific hybrids, I have the following two questions:-
Quoting from wikipedia:-
The offspring of an interspecific cross are very often sterile; thus,
hybrid sterility prevents the movement of genes from one species to
the…
stochastic13
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12
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How do plants 'tell time' for circadian rhythms based on a ~24 cycle?
I've read that many plants have some sort of circadian rhythm where they perform a certain action on a cycle of about 24 hours, like the mimosa plant opening and closing its leaves. Obviously, this is done in order to synchronize with the sun, but…
Gordon Gustafson
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Can whales send each other [3D] images?
Russell Arnott, apparently an oceanographer, who currently works as a project manager at the Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge University (UK), wrote in his piece Whales and Waves (2016, p.2):
New research from the DAREWIN Institute postulates that…
Araucaria
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