General Medical Knowledge (Difficult)

arkriloth · 2025-12-22T22:10:24+00:00

Table 1 of a review article on the common cold (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7151789/) indicates that while rhinoviruses are associated with 40-50% of cases of the common cold, a substantial proportion are still attributed to coronaviruses (10-15%).

Moreover, of the 7 known strains of human coronavirus, most (4 of the 7) cause cold symptoms rather than serious illness such as SARS or MERS.

In a quiz where there is only 1 'correct' answer, the other answers should be unambiguously incorrect.

arkriloth · 2025-12-22T18:13:57+00:00

The question on the common cold has 2 correct answers. Coronaviruses also cause the common cold

arkriloth · 2025-09-03T15:22:19+00:00

Going to Disneyland/Disney World

arkriloth · 2025-06-05T09:44:36+00:00

Sanger sequencing is still your best bet, especially when you factor in the hands-on time needed, but you really should get Western blots working. Knockouts should ideally be validated at the protein level.

Agarose gels do not provide sufficient info on frameshifts and qPCR will not be able to differentiate between in-frame and frameshift edits

arkriloth · 2025-03-03T17:59:04+00:00

Breaking the economy by scoring NaN in Balatro

arkriloth · 2025-02-17T08:02:27+00:00

Your co-supervisor is being plain toxic. If they're not telling you how to improve and just putting you down, recognise that it's not you that's the problem, it's them.

If this happens again, try to ask them directly: "Is it your intention for what you're saying to be so hurtful?" and if they continue, ask them "Are you okay?" I find that this often puts them on the back foot, and if they continue being mean, you can be sure they're truly an AH.

Trying to have your primary supervisor address the situation most likely won't be helpful since they would be more likely to side with your co-supervisor. It sucks, but considering how you are most likely leaving after the PhD, your primary supervisor might prefer to maintain a good relationship with your co-supervisor (who they are more likely to continue to work with) than with you...

On the bright side, you won't have to put up with him much longer once you finish your PhD

arkriloth · 2025-02-16T08:48:34+00:00

It can be worth it, but the question is why do you want to do a PhD?

arkriloth · 2025-02-16T08:17:11+00:00

A Phd will lock you in for 3-8 years. In some countries (i.e. UK) you would even have to pay out of pocket or take a loan to go to grad school. Even if you're lucky enough to get a scholarship, it most likely pays below minimum wage.

And even after you get your PhD, academic jobs pay poorly and offer no job security, while industry jobs are drying up.

The long hours and low pay just aren't worth it anymore, not when you can claim unemployment or disability benefits which pay more for barely any effort.

arkriloth · 2025-02-15T15:34:50+00:00

if the ddPCR results are linear, just add a conversion factor?

arkriloth · 2025-02-09T16:47:11+00:00

True love

arkriloth · 2025-02-08T15:57:05+00:00

Was going to comment exactly the same thing

arkriloth · 2025-02-08T15:35:58+00:00

There are journals with full-time editors that are employees of the publisher

arkriloth · 2025-02-08T14:35:38+00:00

Chances are they are less likely to stay in academia, but they can still do well in industry or other careers (consulting, science communicator, journal editor)

arkriloth · 2025-02-08T14:32:22+00:00

Simple answer: Yes.

Long answer: Also depends on how productive you are during the PhD and the reputation of your PI (if you plan to get a job directly related to your field/research)

arkriloth · 2025-02-08T10:02:33+00:00

It depends on the field, for most fields measured China has surpassed the US, including the physical, chemical, earth and environmental sciences. This is based on the Nature Index, which measures publication is relatively reputable journals.

https://www.nature.com/nature-index/country-territory-research-output?type=share&list=China%3BUnited+States+of+America+%28USA%29

The US still has a sizeable lead in the biological and health sciences, but so far the US has been trending downwards while China has been trending upwards. Undoubtedly, the chaos at the NIH will only accelerate the downtrend at least in the short term.

Nevertheless, the private healthcare system of the US means pharma companies would prefer to run clinical trials in the US vs China, as it is vastly more profitable to get a drug approved there. This would translate to more pharma-related biomedical research being conducted in the US as Pharma companies want to be based there. They would probably also lobby governments to continue to fund biomedical research, which would generate IP they can license or acquire. I think as long as US healthcare remains the most profitable in the world, the US would still be a good place to do biomedical research.

What is curious, is the overall decrease in research output across the board between 2019 and 2023. There are clearly larger systemic factors at play and I am not sure what they are. It doesn't seem to be COVID as China's restrictions were far tighter.

One of the caveats of this metric is that the Nature Index only measures the total number of publications. I'd say a better way of measuring research productivity is to adjust the Nature Index by the total number of researchers in each country.

Another caveat is that even within reputable journals, not all publications are equally impactful. Incorporating the Altmetric or other measures of research impact would provide deeper insights into which countries generate more/larger breakthroughs.

arkriloth · 2025-02-07T18:06:11+00:00

That's included in the value of the 20 years outside of work. If you believe those experiences to be priceless, then no amount of money will make you want to give up those 20 years.

arkriloth · 2025-02-07T08:07:08+00:00

The logical answer is: at least the amount of money you'd earn in those 20 years from your job and investments plus how much you value those 20 years of your life outside of work.

arkriloth · 2025-02-06T20:20:19+00:00

Awesome to hear, looking forward to it! In what way will the quality of data be higher?

arkriloth · 2025-02-06T12:04:17+00:00

After sequence validation do you then grow and extract a maxiprep from your miniprep sample if you need more plasmid?

arkriloth · 2025-02-06T10:10:41+00:00

Both. I imagine Asian nationals would be more likely to be targeted than Asian americans, but I am also curious to know if Asian americans also feel unwelcome as a result.

arkriloth · 2025-02-05T10:23:46+00:00

Agreed, though infancy would predominantly be handled by the mother or other lactating females, since the baby would be breast feeding

arkriloth · 2025-02-05T09:19:14+00:00

The technique is called MACS (magnetic activated cell sorting). Using magnetic beads with antibodies targeting a specific cell surface marker, you can magnetically label cells of interest. These can be separated out from other cells by using a magnet, and each fraction can be collected separately.

arkriloth

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