Questions tagged [literature]
Questions about scientific journal papers, books or other written sources, or for requests for references.
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Can Gravity convection incubators negatively affect the growth of strict aerobic bacteria?
Background
Gravity incubators rely on natural convection for heat distribution. There is no fan or blower system, and the heat rises from the heating element at the bottom of the incubator.
https://...
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Is there a comprehensive Taxonomical ID database?
I know there are resources that outline the latest taxa, such as wikispecies or Kew Gardens. However, I have not found any resources which detail the defining features of each taxa. Are there any ...
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Largest crinoid species
On the wikipedia page of crinoids (sea lilies and feather stars), one can find the following statement in the paragraph "Morphology":
[...] and fossil species are known with 20 m (66 ft) ...
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Is there such thing as "being aware of itself" at a cellular level, or is awareness only a multicellular thing?
It appears to me after a brief thought, that you need multiple cells to send and coordinate messages in order to have "self awareness". Basically, you need some sort of centralized brain it ...
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An interesting paper on hunter-gatherer social dynamics and cooperation
I've read a paper long ago on the cooperativeness in the hunter-gatherer primitive societies. Their conclusion is that for hunters, cooperation dominates competition; for gatherers, competition ...
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Relation between the number of children and maternal telomere lengths
I've read multiple papers with contradictory findings. Some suggests a strong negative effect by birth-giving on telomere lengths. Others disagree. However, none of them establishes causal relations ...
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Sexual dimorphism of the Amphimachairodus genus of saber-toothed cats
Amphimachairodus is an extinct genus of particularly large saber-toothed cats.
Per Alan Turner and Mauricio Antón's The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives: An Illustrated Guide to Their Evolution and ...
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Flora and fauna of early homo sapiens environment?
Where can I find as much detail as possible on the flora and fauna (and perhaps geological structures too) between the time of the origin of Homo Sapiens say ~300kya to their "out of Africa" ...
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Have the potential therapeutic applications of cell fusion between cancer cells and neural cells been investigated?
Studies have appeared on the possible role that cell fusion plays in the formation of certain cancers. For instance, Sitar et al. (2019) have looked into the process of cell fusion in the formation of ...
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Size of Purussaurus, a giant Miocene crocodylian (2022) [closed]
What is the currently accepted size estimates (length and mass) of Purussurus barsiliensis? I quote the relevant part in Wikipedia.
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purussaurus
The skull ...
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Mathematical aspects of the study of dinosaur locomotion
I'm interested in getting a better understanding of dinosaur locomotion. Therefore, I am looking for a book that will cover various mathematical aspects and discuss various mathematical tools for ...
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Why and who: named some fish "bashers" (African electrofish taxon "stonebasher")
Folklore question for itinerant elephantfish/electrofish experts happening to see this:Is any stonebasher fish named for a behavior related to bashing...
something or some part of its anatomy against ...
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What is the median concentration of spike antigen in COVID positive patients?
I am searching for the plasma spike concentration in COVID patients. The closest possible reference I found claims that spike was only detectable in 5 of 64 COVID-19 positive patients.
However, their ...
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What are the definition of pecking order? [closed]
Pecking order is the phenomenon that dominating individual usually eat first. It is commonly observed in animals. In animals, it is often due to the fact that the strong individual won the fights for ...
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What is the true response of human photoreceptors to different wavelengths? Why is there so much disagreement in the literature?
I can find several qualitatively different diagrams of the responsiveness of human cones and rods to different wavelengths of light.
A page referencing Bowmaker and Dartnall, 1980 has the following ...
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Sexual devolpment and sexual organs in humans
In an anatomy book from a friend studying medicine (Netter's book), I looked at some elements of sexual development in embryos. From a developmental stance, we can draw some analogous organs that ...
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Bacteria with daily bimodal energy cycle
Many years ago (about 20) I was told the following story by someone who was in field of biology that at some point there was a rift between researchers of some biological organism, that they were ...
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How do the maximum rates of calcium pumping compare between the calcium ATPases SERCA and PMCA
Two important Calcium ATPases found within cells are the Sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ ATPase (SERCA) and the Plasma membrane Ca2+ ATPase (PMCA). Both use ATP to help maintain resting calcium ...
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Genetic evolution without crossover
Can someone please point me to the origin of the system of coupled differential equations (1) in Section 2 of Shahshahani's book$^\star$?
$$ \dot{x}_i = x_i \sum_{j=1}^n m_{ij} \frac{x_j}{|x|} $$
...
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How does the phosphorylation state of 4E-BPs affect translation of nuclear-encoded mitochondrial transcripts?
A 2020 review paper about mTOR (ref. 1) says:
because biomass accumulation demands vast reserves of energetic currency, mTORC1 enhances translation of nuclear-encoded mitochondrial transcripts ...
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How to decipher references in natural history works of the late Renaissance and early Modernity?
Old botany books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries (and maybe also some later ones) enumerating lists of species used to give references to their sources as abbreviations consisting of one or few ...
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"Free space" volume in the nucleus
Take a mammalian cell, say a HeLa cell for concreteness. If a molecule (e.g. a transcription factor) enters the nucleus, what is the effective volume that it can explore/access there by free diffusion?...
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Why did Rivers replace Koch's postulates?
In 1937, Rivers introduced a new set of postulates that were meant to replace those formulated by Koch.
However, I couldn't find an article (or other scientific literature) that describes why Koch's ...
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References for historical momentum in asexual species definitions
For sexually reproducing organisms, the scope of a species is somewhat fixed by reproductive compatibility.
However, this all collapses for organisms that exclusively reproduce asexually.
Here, my ...
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Exploring speed of ants
I'm working on developing a model of ant foraging. To do this, I have simulated food morsels distributed randomly within an area, with the minimum distance between morsels being variable. I'm trying ...
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Soil microbiology reference
I am after some good reference on Soil Microbe Ecology and Biology. I am a biophysicist, and have read the very gentle approach of "Life in the Soil" (James Nardi). Another book I have been ...
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What fraction of bacterial proteins are membrane bound?
Almen et al. showed that around 27% of the human coding proteins are membrane bound.
How does this compare with bacteria such as E.coli or B.subtilis (or any other bacteria)? Is there a paper out ...
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Questions on mid-2019 Covid-19 Spread in Spain
I recently read in the news from Reuters that Covid-19 was already present in the Europe in March 2019 as reported by the study by Chavarria-Miró et al (2020). According to Chavarria-Miró et al they ...
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Is it possible to exclude article types in a PubMed search?
I have a question about searching PubMed. I want to search for original research papers while omitting reviews. Is this possible in PubMed?
Example
If I am interested in the relation between Acute ...
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Specific mechanism behind lethality of yellow coat color in mice
Our high school genetics chapter has some extra information about L.Cuenot. It only covered his research, and the fact that mice homozygous for yellow coat color would die before birth. It was an ...
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Symmetry in Biology
It seems a curious fact to me that all organisms I can think of exhibit some definite symmetry on a large scale (much larger than molecules), and in particular mirror symmetry. Since it is so wide ...
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What is the evolution metaphor about water flowing downhill?
As part of my biology undergrad degree, I took a course on the Origin of Species, where we read Darwin's book and also several other readings about the origins of evolution.
I recall that during this ...
user35338
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How can I search through literature databases for words containing a * when the asterisk is read as syntax and not part of a query?
I'm exploring the literature on microRNA, where it is common for the less utilised strand of the miRNA duplex to be referred to as the miRNA* strand.
However, I am experiencing some issue searching ...
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Exhalation in human breath, through mouth or nose: which is most usual?
Until now I believed that breath exhalation through the mouth is common for most human beings, and this fact is implicit in several technical contexts of which I can think (sports, music, medical ...
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What is the energy required for storing and performing computations in synthetic computational biological cells?
I want to know the energy costs of various computations performed through synthetic biological circuits in terms of ATP. I am primarily interested in storing of bits, addition, and multiplication ...
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Factors of infection rate
I refer to J.H. Jones' Notes on R0.
Preliminaries
The standard SIR model consists of a system of three differential equations
$$ds/dt = -\beta s i$$
$$di/dt = \beta s i - \nu i$$
$$dr/dt = \nu i$...
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Floats of Algae, a house-made conjecture
Background
In North of Scotland there are many seaweed types. One is a green algae (chlorophyta).
They are full of 'bubbles'. According to web searches one of those bubbles (there are two types you ...
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Recommended books and articles on the origin and evolution of sexual reproduction? [closed]
I'm interested in learning about the origin and evolution of life on Earth. In particular, one topic that puzzles me a lot as a layman is the evolution of sexual reproduction, since the DNA mutations ...
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Self-study genetics
I'm new at the field of genomics. I'm a theoretical physicist by training and now we would like to translate some of the ideas to the DNA, possibly in real genomic instances. The concrete example ...
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Is the SHC014 chimeric coronavirus "eerily similar" to Covid-19 in anything but a journalistic sense?
Gulf News writes:
In the virology community, their project is known as "chimeric coronavirus", eerily similar to COVID-19. This chimera is created in a petridish, reportedly with the "...
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Best fundamental literature about genetics [closed]
I'm seeking for good genetics literature. I'm not afraid of it's complexity, because I want to have relevant knowledges about molecular genetics. After Wikipedia articles and basic molecular-biology ...
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Are there any studies on the solar latitude limits of different plant species, beyond which they wouldn't thrive even with suitable weather?
Not sure whether this belongs here or in the Gardening & Landscaping StackExchange, but here goes...
According to maps provided in the paper Present and future Köppen-Geiger climate ...
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How does species diversity vs Earth total biomass relate?
Are there any laws/theoretical foundations about how diversity of species relate with total biomass on Earth?
While there is a lot of esoteric sort of talk "humanity dis-balances the live on the ...
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What percentage of individuals infected with COVID-19 don't have symptoms?
There are various statistics estimating mortality of COVID-19 infections, based on how many diagnosed people have died. These numbers are used by various media to extrapolate how many people will die ...
user5294
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Ion-gated ion channels
Today I've heard for the first time of calcium-gated ion channels but find it hard to get an idea how they work, where they are located, and which role they play.
I assume calcium-gated ion channels ...
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Is feeding wild pigeons really "weakening the entire species"?
While reading about what foods are healthy for pigeons, I came across the following paragraph: (Source)
Human interaction and improper feeding of domestic and wild pigeons is believed to be one of ...
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Reference Request: Human visual system takes in $10^7$ bits/sec at the periphery and compresses it down to 50 bits/sec deep inside
In Sparse Components of Images and Optimal Atomic Decompositions by Donoho, 1998, the author claims that
The human visual system is thought to do a tremendous job in achieving sparse ...
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quantification of glucose utilization in different metabolic processes
Glucose is commonly associated with ATP production. However, only a small fraction of glucose is utilized this way.
The intermediates of glycolysis, TCA cycle, etc. are precursors to various ...
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Original Lotka–Volterra model
I am looking for the articles in which Lotka and Volterra published their original predator prey model. I couldn’t find the model presented in many textbooks in Lotka’s book Elements of Physical ...
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Nature versus nurture regarding aggression in specific dog breeds
A week ago I was bitten in my face by a dog that originally came from an asylum. That dog is half Rottweiler. Some people claim that the history of the dog is probably different from what the asylum ...
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