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Shall we have MathJax?

For people not familiar with this name -- MathJax is a plugin which converts LaTeX math markup like $X_1^2$ into proper math notation, in this case .

On one hand equations may appear here too rare to justify it, on the other hand it might be useful for chemistry; maybe it is not a desired use of this system, but it is easier to type $H_2O$ than to fight with HTML subscript.

I  hope that equations on this site are not rare! There are many fields of biology that require math to have any reasonably coherent discussion. Although it's true that using it for molecular formulae may be an abuse.

My only complaint about it is that it seems to freeze up my browser (Firefox), and I have heard about it freezing up other people's browsers as well (IE, Opera, Chrome).  This is particularly evident at the Theoretical Physics site.

@Larian Very old hardware? The software is actually incredibly mature and stable so this sounds like an uncommon issue. If it persists then you should definitely file a bug on the MathJax developer site.

any idea how long this will take to implement? I had to resort to using an image in this question: http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/2599/what-are-the-units-of-q10-temperature-sensitivity

this one too http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/2626/can-i-estimate-leaf-temperature-from-air-temperature-what-other-information-wou

Yes, because to be frank, typing out any math without some sort of notation system in the Stack Exchange software is a pain. And I don't necessarily think it's "overkill". While some users might not use it a great deal, most of my work is either mathematical biology or mathematical epidemiology, and talking about predator-prey models, epidemic models, etc. - which don't really have a home to talk about their substance rather than their implementation outside of this site - is essentially impossible without typing out some math.
More to the point, deciding not to have it I think stakes out a somewhat dangerous position that this site isn't interested in questions regarding Biology that require heading into any math more complex than high school algebra.

+1, there's a lot of mathematics in higher-level biology. We want to promote those questions.

And let's not forget disciplines such as biochemistry, physical chemistry or molecular modeling!

lots of mathematics in ecology too!

+1,  \LaTeX support is essential to the this site. Without it, the scope of questions and answers will be limited.

My only complaint about it is that it seems to freeze up my browser (Firefox), and I have heard about it freezing up other people's browsers as well (IE, Opera, Chrome).  This is particularly evident at the Theoretical Physics site.

@LarianLeQuella The better solution of this problem is to send MathJax authors good bug reports rather than not-using it... I'm a heavy user of MathJaxed stat.se and I have never had any problems.

Congratulations, you should now have MathJax implemented here!
[EDIT]: I almost forgot to include -- the TeX / LaTeX guides are all on meta.Math. If you'd like to experiment with the formatting, I suggest using their Sandbox.

Thanks for enabling it. Could you also change the configuration to the one chemistry.SE uses? The mhchem package for chemical formulas would also be useful here.

@MadScientist Done! :)

The basic gist is, a demonstrated need for MathJax needs to be shown before we can enable it. It's a heavy script that we have to load on every page, and on some machines it can cause a hefty loading time. So if it's extremely rare that it comes up in comparison to the bulk of questions on the site, we prefer not to enable it. Consider Stack Overflow, which we still avoid enabling MathJax, because it just has too much slowdown for how comparatively rare it turns up.
We'll be keeping an eye on this question for evidence for and against the implementation of MathJax.

"It's a heavy script that we have to load on every page, and on some machines it can cause a hefty loading time." - +1 for this. On math.SE, it's a given. For physics.SE, the necessity is demonstrable. Here... I don't see that many questions that require mathematical notation coming up soon, so I'm not sure if the performance penalty of MathJax is justified here.

Scripts are cached though...

I’m not convinced. You essentially have to load the script once. For the whole SE network. Scratch that, for all sites on the interwebs which include the MathJax script from their content delivery network. This once-for-all load time is entirely negligible.

See my answer when this question was asked for the Cognative Sciences SE site for some details concerning the misconceptions of the load that MathJax places on pages that don't include mathematics.

We should have LaTeX support - there's no reason not to unless it burdens the system. That's why we shouldn't use MathJax, which is client-side and will increase the size of every fresh site load.
We should use a server-side option which produces SVGs and stores them. They have an excellent system at Scienceforums, which they have open-sourced here. It's for IPB but could be easily adapted for SE 2.0.

“will increase the size of every fresh site load” – no, that is wrong. See my comment on Grace Note’s (equally wrong) answer.

As a compromise, I'd like to point out this tool.  It allows you to enter LaTeX notation either directly or using buttons then download a rendered image.  It works in real time and can be included in answers by copying the URL location then inserting a picture as normal.
Whilst this is obviously not ideal for those used to entering LaTeX directly, it of course doesn't add to page loading times.

“it of course doesn't add to page loading times” – and neither does MathJax. See my comment below Grace Note’s answer.

It seems like huge overkill for this site.  The only time I'd use it is when talking about biophysics stuff, but there's always Physics.SE.  Getting it enabled on EE.SE was like pulling teeth as the administration was fearful of the tremendous burden it placed on bandwidth.
<sub> and → seems fine to satisfy most casual chemical conversations.

How would it be overkill? It is already implemented in many SO (so it should be easy to add it to this, I guess), and it won't prevent to use <sub>. But it will definitely be welcome when talking of higher-level biology/chemistry.

I don't think it would be overkill or rarely used. Mathematical notation is essential for most serious discussions of ecology.

@nico echoing Grace Note, if there is a need, it can be enabled.  Right now it's putting the cart before the horse.

I just edited someone's answer to convert things like NH_3 to NH3, and it was quite a pain. MathJax might make this easier.

Can I also point out it can be used to make much better tables than anything else we have?  I think we are limiting MathJax too much if we think of it solely in terms of equations.   I just discovered it was active last night and used it to make the table here:
Factor causing Methicilin-resistance in MRSA?
If you look at the edits, you can see the ascii tables I was trying to make, but I think that came out much better.
Also is it highlighted somewhere other than this question that we can use Mathjax?  I have wanted to use it before and just assumed we didn't have it.  If it is highlighted, I certainly missed it.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


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Are palaeontology/palaeobiology questions allowed?
I figured I'd want to ask fossil-related stuff, but I'm not sure if this would be within the purview of this SE site. Can I ask questions about, say, dinosaurs or pre-Holocene mammals?

In private beta and early public, I'd be fairly liberal with scope.  They aren't clearly off-topic, so there's no real reason to actively exclude them.  If they draw more expert eyes to the site, all the better.

I cannot see how paleontology would not fall under the scope of biology unless the question dealt narrowly with a methodology that might be better for another site (e.g., radioisotope dating -> physics or specific statistical models -> stats)

It depends
It really depends on what you are asking. A question about dinosaur anatomy, mammoth embryology, or hominid evolution would fit pretty solidly in biology.
A question about carbon-dating methods, fossil preservation, or fossil bearing formations in would be pretty firmly in geology, and not biology.
Paleontology is a science that ignores our flawed attempts to classify science into discrete categories.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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"Vote early, vote often"
This is a reproduction of Scott Morrison's post on meta.tex.SE; I believe it is very much applicable to this community as well:

I'm a moderator from MathOverflow, and this "question" is actually unsolicited advice, based on our experience from the initial launch of MathOverflow.
We should encourage everyone to vote positively as often as possible!

Every Stack Exchange site will eventually end up with a different "base level" of voting --- that is, the expected number of upvotes for a question of a given level of excellence. (This effect occurs because people see a good question, but already with a certain number of votes, and think "oh, I would have upvoted this, but it already has enough".)
It's easy for us to affect this "base level" by encouraging high levels of upvoting now. We're setting the standards, and this really will have an effect.
(On MathOverflow, we were very active about this early on, specifically encouraging all the initial round of users to vote early and often. You can compare statistics, and see that the average vote total for a MathOverflow question is much higher than on any of the other SE 1.0 sites.)
In case it's not obvious: the rationale for wanting this base level to be high is that it provides better positive feedback to good contributors.

I think that we should revisit this voting question. At the moment, I think that votes are coming in slowly and infrequently.

yeah we do seem to have cycles - some times a question can receive loads of votes in a very short space of time, or vica versa. I try to vote up as many questions/answers as I can read (am allowed to) when I get the opportunity, but there are days when I forget >.<

I feel that certain questions are upvoted just because most people found it interesting (or most easily understood with respect to  technicalities). I don't think thats what should be a dominating criterion for an upvote. Answer to most of these "interesting" questions can be obtained by simply googling or checking wikipedia. Upvoting is for research effort and usefulness. I don't wish to pinpoint but several questions dont deserve the number of upvotes that they have..
Our Q&A have to get more analytical.

From my observations so far I'd say we have a pretty healthy voting behaviour. Good questions and answers usually get quite a few votes, and we have our share of double-digit upvoted posts.
If we continue in this manner we should have enough high reputation users that can perform the various moderation duties on this site in the future.

I just noticed an extremely stupid voting event. Please see this. No details in the question, no effort and not a significant scientific problem either. It has bloody +10 votes. There are Q/As with much more effort and content but are not upvoted.

@WYSIWYG now 17 votes.


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Can we have bio.stackexchange.com as a redirect?
This might sound a bit peculiar, but I was wondering if it's possible to have http://bio.stackexchange.com to redirect to this site. I was thinking "BioStackExchange" sounds nice, and thought having that URL redirect here might be good...

Can you have it? Sure.
Should you have it? Eh...

Are there any other meanings for "bio" that might cause conflicts in the future?
Do folks actually intend to use this? (yeah, it's less to type, but once you've typed biology.stackexchange.com a few times, your browser probably suggests it after "bio...")

If you foresee any new site with "bio", it is actually a pro for reserving it for this site...

I can't imagine any site for which "bio" would be more appropriate.

Perhaps a biographical site or bio-medical engineering could use it, but they would probably favor something more specific. It still seems like this site would be far more appropriate for the redirect though.

I agree that most people outside the field would probably think of biography before biology when confronted with bio-. Have a look at the google results when searching for bio.


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Who should the moderators be?
High time to obtain some pro tem mods. [In short, soon 4 users will be made temporary moderators. After site graduation (or earlier in case of heavy moderation problems), pro tem mods will become regular users again and diamonds will be permanently given to 3 people selected in open election.]
Rules:

A person interested in being a mod posts an answer featuring username and the link to the profile, plus an optional why-me text.
Nominating someone else is not allowed. Better poke this user on chat and ask to consider starting.
Users express their support/negation by voting, and support words/doubts as comments.
SE team will use the results as a tip who to select.

My name is Alexander Galkin (it is my real name, so is the photo on my avatar).
I hold a medial degree with summa cum lauda from Kazan Medical University and I have spent 8 years in total working as a researcher in neuroscience, cognitive science, pharmacology, biochemistry and computer simulation of single neurons and neuronal networks. The latter inspired me to study computer science and I am about to graduate from Hamburg University of Technology with the degree of Dipl. Ing. in Computer Science.
I am an experienced (1.5yr) StackExchange user with almost 2k reputation on the main StackOverflow site and prominent presence on some other sides, like German Language, Programmers etc.
I love answering questions and helping people and I will do my best to make our site a decent member of the StackExchange stack.
I don't have moderator experience on SE, but I have been moderator for already about 10 years on other popular forums, for example on this Esperanto-forum.

+1 Support candidacy.

+1 I hope you become a mod, as real name mods who showed expertise will attract more experts from outside.

I'll go ahead and nominate myself (Mad Scientist).
I'm one of the pro-tem mods on Skeptics, so I have some experience in moderating an SE site.

+1 Support candidacy.

mbq
I'm an elected moderator on Stats and Physics so I have some experience; I'm in favor of a broad scope, I consider clean look a factor improving quality (thus I often edit stuff) and I think policies should grow organically rather than be designed a priori.
I live in the CET zone.

+1 Support candidacy.

+1 mbq is an excellent mod over on Stats

Thanks for writing about your position in some common questions. The moderators affect policy a lot, even if not on purpose.

while I agree with your statement, is it a good idea to become mod on 3 very brought and tricky topics? Do you really have time and expertise with 25 for discussion of tricky questions and problems on meta on 3 sites? Sorry but nobody has very broad and detailed scope in physics and biology with 25 if at all, I would rather like to see a mod focusing on the very broad biology site without other tasks

@WernerSchmitt Even with 199 no-one would have expertise to solve all thematic problems on even single site -- that's why this is a community's burden, moderators are rather janitors that clean, fix small problems and occasionally organize something. About time, CV and Physics are grown-ups and peaceful places; single SO mod does 10x work that I do now.

Biology Profile
Meta Profile

Sorry I'm a bit late with this.
I wasn't originally going to put myself forward as I am quite new to the StackExchange platform.  However I have really very much enjoyed working with you all to help build the site over the last few days and feel that I would be able to give a lot!  I have been active on the main site every day but one and have also tried to help in discussions on meta.
A little about me, I'm taking my final A-Level exams later this year (including biology, of course!) and assuming that all goes well will be taking up my place at medical school.  So, whilst I may be still amassing a knowledge base, I would hope to be useful to the community in the years to come. I say years because I think it's important for mods to be in it for the long haul in order to build a relationship with other frequent users!
Whilst I don't have any previous moderating experience on StackExchange, I was a moderator for nearly three years on a tech support forum with in excess of 400,000 members and believe I learnt a lot from that experience.  I certainly believe that I would be well suited to introducing new experts to the SE platform and hopefully encouraging them to stay.  I am a native English speaker and member of SE English and have made a fair few edits here that have hopefully made things a little clearer and more consistently formatted (20 edits approved, more in the queue).
All in all I would love to take a leading role in the creation, development and promotion of the SE Biology site.  Whatever the outcome, I look forward to working alongside everyone in the community!

What does "A-level exams" mean?

Sorry, they're the English "Further Education" level exams, I guess they could be viewed universally as university entrance exams?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCE_Advanced_Level

Poshpaws
I  have a strong interest in seeing this site be successful. I also believe in moderation and respect at all times, and like to try and encourage citations where appropriate.
I also confess that I had to look up what "Pro Tempore" means.


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How similar must a duplicate question be?
This question seems very similar to an earlier question, differing mainly in the earlier question asking why earlier species were giant (or why such is less common now).  (The answers to the earlier mostly addressed the content of the later question and not the specific historical factors.)
A comment to the earlier question asked for a clarification: Do you mean "what was the reason for some plant and animals to become giant in course of evolution?" or probably "What are the advances and drawbacks of being a giant plant or animal organism?"  Even under natural selection these are distinct questions--the former might include "accidental" causes of size differences which are selection neutral (e.g., a particular gene might have a beneficial effect and a selection-neutral [or less negative than the other benefit] size effect) and the former seems to emphasize environment factors or perhaps specific historical factors (but the historical factors probably differed, e.g., huge dragonflies might have been more practical with higher oxygen concentration and/or a denser atmosphere but such factors might be insignificant in explaining dinosaur or Giant Sloth sizes); however, they are similar (and the answers--mostly avoiding the historical factors--are even more likely to be similar).
Anyway, what are the guidelines for judging a question to be a duplicate?

I'm a bit of a layperson when it comes to biology, so I'm pretty interested in seeing how this community feels about the similarities between these two questions.

I believe questions should only be marked as duplicate if and only if an answer to the question it is being marked as a duplicate of would clearly and completely answers the question asked in the original question.
In the particular example you raise I do not believe this applies. The first question is about why organisms get larger during evolution, whilst the second is about why there are larger animals in the fossil record than are alive today.

I agree that those two questions are substantially different (which was why I only included a comment in the later question pointing to the earlier one).  On the other hand, the answers to the earlier question generally seem to answer the later one (i.e., are not quite on-target--and I am guilty in this case).

True. I'd be inclined to add a comment pointing that out (as I see you did) rather than vote to close as duplicate.


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Comment deletion?
In reference to the question about whether the mRNA or the ribosome move during translation, a number of the comments do not add anything to the understanding of answers or constructively promote conversation. In fact, some of them seem to be a leaning towards personal attacks.
Without flagging a lot of the comments individually, I would suggest a mod remove the unnecessary comments as per the guidelines set out in the comment removal policy question here on meta.Bio.
What are your thoughts on the issue?

I've removed a couple of comments from this answer that were not adding much in addition to a couple from the question itself.  As it's late, I'm sleepy and not wanting to be heavy handed because of it would you mind raising a couple of flags on anything else that you think needs to be pruned in that question?

It looks much cleaner and civil already. ty.


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Are users only asking for homework help welcome?
Following up the post about homework question policies, this user has asked 11 questions, all homework in nature, and has not attempted to answer at least some of them, nor tried answering any other questions. This is his latest question on mutant crosses. As for the homework policy, we just shouldn't answer if there's been no attempt at an explanation or solution by the user, but how do we deal with users that only ask homework problems?

We need to really nail down our homework policy, so that we can start enforcing it consistently. That's the main problem here.

@MadScientist I made my accepted answer community wiki, so missing points can be added. Maybe we should create a meta question to gather links to other meta questions concerning new users violating\not knowing site rules, so we can easily point to in a comment with a link? Probably we can adopt more guidelines from physics and skeptics.se than homework

Look me probably about 50 homework questions in Math.SE  here but I do use references! Some qs are lower quality but some better, always hard to know beforehand. I tried hard to make the content readable to future random walkers. Homeworks are good, they are still questions. Please, stop suggesting discrimination in words such as homeworks. "Homework discrimination" can be much worse problem...perhaps the reason for "homework obfuscation".

...what about monetizing homework -threads with references to drive quality up? I think it would not require much to computationally preprocess the threads (but a lot of monotonous cleaning etc) and organize them to some sort of catalogs -- a bit like SO library.

I see comments and answers written by mathematicians or physicists and I just want to point out that homework tasks in biology are quite different. Unless it demand some "wet work" it is usually just finding proper paragraph in textbook. Especially in highschool.

A look at physics.se is interesting, because of how much homework questions can this site get and how do they deal with it.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework could become quite a lot, but you can filter -[homework]
https://physics.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/homework
The conclusion seems to be:

allow homework questions (of students(?)), probably high school questions can be answered by textbook\wikipedia and fall into category "not a real question"
rather explain how to solve the problem than giving out exact calculation\result, SE is a learning site and we all remember the many hours we put ourselves into solving course exercises (imho most important part of your studies) and how important this is to really understand theories, solve problems on your own correctly and graduate successfully.
the questioner should not simply copy paste a textbook problem, but explain what he tried and his specific problems are, otherwise I tend to downvote or even vote to close as too localized. If we explain misunderstandings, those homework questions might be useful for other user too. So in the best case such homework questions dont look like a homework question ;)

this is a good answer. Your second bullet point raises another interesting question, though: what do we do about answers which simply answer the question with no explanation?

If you have enough regular user (this site imo has) than a lot of moderation task can be solved by upvoting, downvoting, non-voting. The better formatted and well-explained answer gets my upvote in this case. Voting should save you moderation time. Anyway homework questions on physics are so localized that they dont earn many upvotes at all due to lack of interest, but we need to prevent seeding this site with copy pasted textbook problems

Re the middle point would that include going through working step by step?

@RoryM Well, I would not forbid such questions, but Im also not very inclined to answer them with much effort or step by step tutorial, depends on the answerer. I dont expect much upvotes for such Q&A and therefore not much effort likewise, thats why the questionner should make clear what his specific problem with a specficic questions is (how to solve problems is not the topic of this site), or it might get no attention and we dont need a lot unanswered questions here.

-1 for suggesting obfusction as a joke at the end. Obfuscation helps none. I think the common policy should start from obfuscation which means proper references. Please, see my answer.

I think this site can be very helpful to students, we should encourage them to come here with specific questions.
That said, students are capable of asking good factual and focused questions. The post you linked to is, most importantly, a bad question for any SE, independent of being copied directly from the user's homework. Why?

It starts by talking about the student. The bio final has no relevance to the concept.
It has "Problem:" mid text. This should be implied.
It includes a table. Never include a table unless the question is specifically about how to read the table. But it's not, it's about...
...well, it has three sub-questions.

A repeat user is infinitely better than 11 one-time askers because he can learn. I'd say leave a comment and downvote the question. The SO model is supposed to keep bad users from hurting the site, but it will only work with your feedback.

Accept homeworks only if they are properly referenced. Academic dishonesty to dogs, stop the buck here! Obfuscating homeworks does no good to this site and will not credit the author of the questions. It is better to learn proper references here or the painful way later.
I think all homework questions without references should be banned unless the op acknowledges that s/he cannot offer the refences (sometimes that is the case because the lecturers/teachers want less attention, not to reveal the poor quality of their teaching etc).
Please, drive quality up with references.

The homework tag still seems to be strongly underused, and I sense that BioSE has had an increase in (what appears to be) homework/study questions lately. There are users that seem to only post homework questions or obvious study questions (questions that arise during textbook reading), without any reference to how they have tried to solve their problems and without using the homework tag.
I don't know how we should handle this. I find it tricky (and rude) to go in and retag a question to homework when you can only suspect the motivations of the original poster. At the same time, just reposting your homework for others to solve at BioSE (without any attempts of your own) is clearly wrong and against our homework policy.

I find myself more inclined to answer higher level questions, on the simple fact that it puts more higher level content on the site (which we need).

@AtlLED The thing is that if these questions are simply ignored they will contribute to a low answer% (as well as clutter the site). For the record, I think that homework questions are fine, but then they should be tagged as such and the poster should provide their own attempt to a solution - not simply pass their assignments along for others to solve.


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Amount of rep suddenly went down
I am curious as to why/how my rep has gone down by 32 in the past couple of hours - there is nothing on my profile as to why.  It seems something I replied to and had edited (3 upvotes + edit).
Is this due to an account deletion?

There is a checkbox "show removed posts" on the reputation tab of your profile, if you enable it you can see which removed posts are responsible for the loss of reputation.
In this case the reason is that I removed questions posted by a known troll and you had answered one of those.

No worries, am not upset at all about it, just curious.  Thank you for the profile tip as well.

Don't feed the trolls :)

@MattDMo sometimes it is hard to tell who is a troll and who is someone who, for whatever reason, wrote a bad question/answer.


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account deletion - how long does it usually take?
I am wondering usually how long does an account deletion usually take here?  I have followed the steps and are just after the time frame.
Thank you.

Been thinking about this for a while, weighing up the pros and cons as this site has some very interesting content.  However, many of my answers are ignored and what I felt was a rude response I got to my latest (now deleted) question, made the decision easier for me.  Biology is an area outside of my expertise, so I was learning it - but I think I will stick with documentaries.

sad to see you go.  I liked this question in particular: http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/9049/what-biological-constraints-are-there-on-how-large-a-spider-can-grow but admittedly didn't up vote it at the time (when I suppose it would have mattered).

@AtlLED that's okay, I have had the general impression that my contributions here are not really that acceptable (particularly my answers) - after the rude response on my deleted question, it is pretty much confirmed.  I am an enthusiast, not a professional biologist after all.

this is the post in question http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/10161/how-do-kidney-stones-form - it is deleted, but still visible to those that can see deleted posts.

Too bad that you want to leave. The site needs more users, both professionals and enthusiasts. I cannot speak about your personal reasons for leaving, but lots of your content has been upvoted (therefore seen as valuable) and you have gained relatively high rep an a fairly short amount of time. I cannot view the deleted Q, so no comments on that. However, as always on the internet, you sometimes need to be thick-skinned.

Biology is out of my area of expertise (Physics is my area), the content will still be here -so there is no harm there. It is not about being 'thick skinned', it's about what can I do for the site - I do not feel that my contributions are of suitable worth and the rude comments in the deleted question just simply tipped the balance - convincing me that my concern was valid.  Looking at my contributions, I agree with the message behind the rude comments and decided to stop contributing, as I am not a biology expert thus my posts aren't likely to improve to what some members want for the site.

@UV-D Fair enough. I still think that your contributions have been valuable though, both by raising topics and in answers. Everybody has highs and lows in the quality of their posts.

I'd like to add my vote to those who think you should stay. Looking through your profile, 20 out of 21 (non-deleted) questions have been upvoted at least once, and all but 4 have at least 1 answer. All but 3 of your 29 answers have been upvoted, and 6 were accepted as correct (including 1 that wasn't upvoted, but the poster didn't have enough rep). Bio.SE is a very diverse place, with lots of different types of questions, and lots of different types of users. All that's required is a willingness to learn, the desire to share what appropriate knowledge you have, and the ability ...

... to do some basic research before asking a question. Please, don't worry about your deleted question too much, I've asked not-so-intelligent things before myself :) We are really striving to make this place welcoming, and while I didn't see the rude comments to your deleted question, I'm very sorry to hear that they were the straw that broke the camel's back. Please consider at least just taking a hiatus from the site, either completely or just from contributing, and see how you feel in time. We'd really like to see you stay, but at the same time I can understand your wanting to leave.

Account deletion is a manual process, you might have to wait until the weekend is over and an SE employee sees the request.

no problem, thank you for your reply.


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Are the questions getting easier and less complex?
Why are the questions on Biology SE so easy? Did something happen to scare off the more complex questions? They do not look like they have much research invested into them.

i guess the more troublesome issue is that the easy or i would say popular questions and their answers get more votes than a question/answer with really a great amount of effort. We don't know how to appreciate effort. That makes me think- should right to vote require higher reputation points. This is a new question in itself. I also think like this about our democracy and politics :P

Maybe because not all of us are proffesional biologists - rather just curious people. By the way, I didn't get much complex answers on my easy questions. I wouldn't get any on complex questions I guess.

I think this varies - as it also does with the number of questions per day. And depending on your profession (lets say biologist or biochemist) a lot of these questions seem easy or even trivial. Nevertheless they deserve to be answered in a proper way.


text:
How does one quit a stack exchange site completely and not just logging off?
How does one quit a stack exchange site completely and not just logging off? Any one willing to answer this question?  How do you just delete the the individual sites like biology or english language...you know, the sites that aren't helpful.

There is a help for deleting your account: https://stackoverflow.com/help/deleting-account


text:
Every question asked on this site can be researched and answered independently
I was asked to research my question which was direct and simple while my questions were down voted? So what is the point of Stack Exchanges ask a question get an answer, or this site, if every question can be researched and answered without this site?

The purpose of any Q&A site is not to do your research for you. If you try to get by without Q&A sites like Bio.SE, you will sooner or later notice why they really exist. It's because you can't answer all questions without them. You can research any question without them, but at some point it may simply be impossible to find an answer without some help.
Asking on Bio.SE is no different than asking an expert personally - if you don't make it clear why it is that you need an expert to make the effort, they won't bother. Give the expert a reason as to what makes them uniquely able to help you out, and they just might. As for the "why", there are always only those two reasons: a) the knowledge isn't publically available, or b) it would take you days to find out whereas the expert can answer in minutes.


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Remove warning on my answer.
uh some overactive moderator put a notice on my answer here cause i disagreed with chris and some other guy would you remove it i plainly cite the genetic changes
Why is the current Ebola outbreak different from previous outbreaks?

I've removed it again, you could have avoided this by actually quoting the relevant part of the article.
Your answer is still somewhat misleading as the article states that they don't know if the severity of the outbreak is associated with those mutations, but that is something for the community to decide.

citation included from original article as requested.


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Why can I vote on closed question?
When we vote to close a question , we doesn't allow question to get answers,but we can upvote or downvote this question. When a question is not allowed to get answers, should we also not stop it from getting votes?
Also why should one vote on a question which is not valuable?

I think this will be an excellent question for meta.stackexchange.com

@CRags Take look at below answer and a link in first sentence. This ques was asked in meta before and I didn't know about it.

There's background here.
In an ideal situation, question closure is a temporary state. Either the closed question will be improved and reopened, or it will get deleted.
If the question is reopened, that's great! The asker deserves whatever rep changes come along with the votes -- even the ones from when it was closed. If the question gets deleted, all votes disappear anyway along with their respective reputation changes, so it's like it never happened.
But in the meantime, it doesn't hurt anything to vote on closed questions. (In fact, if I were a user with 500 rep, say, and I disagreed with a question's closing, the only action I'd be able to take is upvoting, since I wouldn't have reopen privileges yet.)

Closed questions will only be deleted automatically when they received little attention and no votes before the closure. If they have votes, they will stay. The same is true for closed and massively downvoted questions, which got enough attention. I think we should go over the last category.

Except for closed duplicate questions


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Should not I vote to close a quesion in which the sentence " I know it is off-topic' is written?
There are some question , the sentence " I know it is off-topic' is written at first ,but  without no shown attempt. Sometimes I want to leave a comment to say if you know it is off-topic and you can find the answer with searching in google or some books, Why do you ask this question in BioSE?
sometimes this sentences convince we not to vote to close.
So, I decided to post this question in meta.

Should this sentence convince me not vote close?
What should we do with this questions?

Why wouldn't you vote to close, if the Q is off-topic? Whether the OP is aware of this or not shouldn't make a difference.

Don't close a question if the post contains "I know it is off topic". Read it and close it only if you think it is off topic. The OP might be wrong in his assessment of his question.


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What should I do with Determined users?
Sometimes when I criticize one's post or comment, the user go mad and vote some of my questions and answers down. It is not usual situation to have three down voted answers within 5min and It isn't a pleasant situation for me.
What should I do in this situation if I know the user?

In general, flag for moderator attention and explain the issue. We do intervene in cases of serious misuse of the voting system and will invalidate votes and suspend users, if necessary.
Users are free to vote on posts based on their own criteria, the major restriction is that targeting posts by a specific user with votes is not allowed. Downvoting a lot of posts from a specific user is prohibited just like creating sock puppets and using them to upvote your own posts.
In this specific case there is no indication that any user is targeting you specifically with downvotes.

I thought only developers and not moderators can see who downvoted a question. Can moderators see who cast the downvotes?

@CRags We moderators can see some limited voting information, more like aggregated voting patterns. We can't see specifically who voted on a particular post.

Oh, OK. Thanks for the reply


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Why can't answers be favorited?
I always favorite great questions , but I can't favorite an answer. If we can favorite good questions, why shouldn't we favorite great answers.
This can have two advantages for the site:

We can have favorited answers by many users and we can realize how good our answers is.(favorited answer is more valuable than upvoted answers)
Also we can have three or two badges for it ( stellar answer(gold badge):An answer favorited by 100 users  -  favorite answer(silver badge):An answer favorited with by 25 users)

If you feel an answer is great please upvote it. That is why upvotes exist.
If you enjoy an answer very much, you can start a bounty on the question and award the bounty to that answer. Answers with bounties will show that it is well beloved!

You just suggested me what to do , when I enjoyed an answer.

Ok, basically you just upvote the answers you enjoy

And also with offering a bounty on a question and awarding this, I can't show and tell others how good this answer is.

Even if you favorite a question, no one will know who favorited it. However if you offer a bounty, it will definitely pull the attention to that post. People will want to see why that answer got bounty and so they will read it more often and the answer will get more upvotes. So basically it attracts more people.

So,why can I favorite question? If i can favorite question, I should can favorite answer. This is all the thing I want to say.

You favorite a question to follow it. You see that the question is good and you would be interested in knowing what answers it will get, you can favorite it. It helps you to follow that question and also bookmark it.

Basically you don't want to miss anything related to that question

Excellent, exactly what I wanted to know.

There is a potential difference though; you might like an answer (for educational purposes, interesting subject, nice presentation), while not being able to evaluate if it is correct. Personally, I'm hesitant to vote on answers if I cannot evalaute whether they are correct (at least partially so), and in those cases the ability to favorite an answer could be useful.

This lack of a feature has been discussed to death on the Meta SE forums.
In short: Jeff Atwood (one of the SE head developers) has refused to add this feature to the SE site, and this feature is unlikely to be added any time in the near future. As expected, it was downvoted to hell. Unfortunately for us, the bookmark (or favouriting the question itself) appears to be the best option for this for now.


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Homework questions?
I am really  against this policy of not  answering homework questions. .StackE is supposed to be a community of helpers ans not those who arrogantly delete questions.  While preparing for our exams we dont have so much time to write each and every detail....why cant the community just provide the answer without counter agitation! ! At the time of exams we are exhausted and the community keeps firing questions on us. This is a hoŕrible policy.  People  preparing for their exams should be given their answers. Can anything be done for us ?????

People who answer questions here do this voluntarily in their free time. I don't see the point to "spoon-feed" things to people which haven't taken the effort to look up basic stuff themselves. If you did this and still have no idea, you're welcome. But you need to be able to pinpoint a relative narrow question which can be answered without writing a book.

No i m subjected to this arrogant and rude behaviour

I don't think it is rude and arrogant but absolutely necessary to prevent this community from a flood of these useless questions.

So can't we have a stack exchange site for homework questions of biology   ............... see this is the rudeness and arrogance : "useless questions "

We. Are. Not. A. Homework. Service. Especially for poorly-formulated, unresearched questions about basic biology, which can be answered with a simple Google search.

I always ask after thoroughly researching

Then share your research, and explain exactly what you're having trouble with. Some of your questions specifically, and many homework questions in general read like you just copied and pasted directly from the assignment, or didn't even do a basic search such as googling the title of your question.

Thats exactly the problem : who has the  time to do extensive research at the time of exams

@Abcd It is a bad idea to start reading the book just before your exams. Who asked you to do last minute reading? You must have had an entire semester to understand the subject.

@Abcd you said above you always ask after thoroughly researching, then you just said you don't have time to do extensive research at exam time. Which is it?

who has the time to complain about stack exchange policy on meta at the time of exams?

See, SE is an advanced forum, not a dictionary. It is made to ask questions which seem confusing or difficult to find answer for. As @MattDMo said, we are not here to teach you the abcd of biology. If you cannot search google, ask your teacher about your query because they are being paid for it. I have already told you a bit about the rules here, and it'd seem a lot better to follow those rules than to challenge them.

Jordi made some good points, I'd like to add a few.

While preparing for our exams we dont have so much time to write each and every detail....why cant the community just provide the answer without counter agitation! [...] People preparing for their exams should be given their answers.

I'd like to point you to an excellent meta post on Programmers.SE. While it uses programming for the examples, the general form is applicable for any student with homework questions. A few key points:

Don't expect an answer in any given time frame. The urgency of your question is not something we are concerned with.

I am reminded of a poster seen in more than one colleague's cubicle: "A lack of preparation on your part is no reason for an emergency on my part." Questions get answered as they get answered - there is no time frame requirement. Some may get answered right away, others take hours, or days, or weeks before someone has an interest in it. Some never get answered. Adding things to your post like "HELP PLZ!!!!!! CAN U ANSWER THIS SOON, MY EXAM IS 2NITE!!!1!1" will actively discourage people from answering, as will txt-speak, which many of us abhor. This is a professional environment, please act like one.

Describe the problem you are having, what your understanding of the problem is and where you are confused. For a question from a student, the best questions are often the ones that are asking how to take a single step in understanding rather than trying to leap all the way to the solution.

As I say to many people, I strongly suggest you take the tour and carefully read through the help center to learn more about the site, including what is on-topic and what is not, and how to ask a good question. Knowing what is on- and off-topic for the site, as well as the other reasons why questions get closed (too broad, opinion-based, unclear questions, personal medical advice, posted on wrong site, etc.) will go a long way towards writing good, answerable questions.
Please remember that the primary purpose of Stack Exchange is not to answer questions for a particular user. The goal is to build a repository of good, specific questions that have well-researched, specific answers so that others can find and be helped by them in the future. The focus is not on you at all in the long run. Therefore, enduring, well-asked questions is what we are looking for, not question 7 on your ecology test.

Copy and paste takes no skill. It cheats you out of the education you are paying to get.

You are taking a particular class to learn about some topic, understand how it's used, and apply your knowledge to real-life situations. This requires puzzling through the steps until you intuitively grasp the concept(s) at hand. As a professional cell and molecular biologist, I almost never think about the Krebs cycle in my everyday work, or how many molecules of Ac-CoA are produced from an 18-C  saturated fatty acid. However, I understand at a fundamental level the reason for the Krebs cycle (also known as the citric acid or TCA cycle) and what it does, and so can apply that knowledge toward generating in my mind a model of how the cell metabolizes nutrients, which may be important for understanding how negative regulation in the immune system works on a molecular level.
If you don't have a good, solid understanding of how these systems work, but you did manage to copy and paste a good answer from Bio.SE into your final essay so you pass the class, you gain nothing. The money, time, and effort expended on that class were worthless, because you didn't learn anything except how to copy and paste from the internet because some poor sap on a website felt bad for you and gave you a clear, detailed answer to your poorly-researched, misunderstood question.
Why should we care what you do with the answer? Because you are part of the next generation of students, or post-docs, or employees working with me in my lab. A scientist with a full, solid background in basic science and training in how to apply it has many of the tools necessary to be an innovative, thoughtful investigator making new discoveries on his/her own. If you cheated and copy-pasted your way through school, you're not going to know how to perform effectively in the lab, requiring extra training, guidance, and supervision, and possibly never contributing on any real level to the work of the lab. You may never even get in the door in the first place, because you won't be able to answer basic interview questions.
So, do your homework! It's perfectly fine to have questions about things - you just need someone to use a different analogy to explain a concept, or you just can't make the logical leap from A to B. But, as all good scientists know, you need to put in the effort to answer those questions, and be a good communicator in regards to what you're looking for and why. There are plenty of excellent homework questions on this site. However, many are not so good, ranging from lousy to completely awful, and we need to maintain the quality of the site for future visitors. Don't be offended if someone asks you to explain something further, or describe your research more, or narrow your question to meet our criteria. We are NOT Yahoo Answers, with no quality filters whatsoever, and page after page filled with nonsensical tripe. We're a different kind of website, and our processes have been put in place for very good reasons. We welcome you to become a good contributor to the site, but we still won't do your homework for you.

Can biology.se develop a "homework site" for asking homework questions

@Abcd Who would answer there? The regulars from this community are obviously not eager to do this. And you would need a lot of expertise to be able to trust the answers...

@Abcd we allow homework questions but there should be some effort from the OP. Helping someone with their homework is fine but doing it for them is unethical (and not good for the one whom you help, in the long run) as well as a waste of time for the answerer. Since these questions are not well formulated (or lack background and explanation), they are not useful to anyone else. Not useful for the site as well.

@Chris .... cant experts take just take few minutes to go to the homework site and check the answers or mark them correct.....at least this method should be adopted. ..development of a new biology stack exchange site

@Abcd how many different ways do you want people to say No? A homework site does not fit in with the overall goals of Stack Exchange, as I explained in my answer above. You are free to propose one on [area51.se], but I doubt it will get any support whatsoever. Please listen to the advice of people who have been around a lot longer than you and have much more experience than you. If you want to ask homework questions, make sure they conform to our rules. If they don't, they will be deleted and you will be question-banned.

@Abcd I for my part will not do this. I am also not doing other peoples homework/assignments. This does not help you.

If you think a homework service is a good thing @Abcd then I don't think you grasp the point of homework. Homework helps teachers (and others who will look at your course grades) judge academic strengths and weaknesses of the students, not the academic strengths and weaknesses of an on-line community. If we do your homework for you, then your teachers won't notice that you are struggling to grasp something, which will only be detrimental to your learning in the long term, leaving you without the skills and knowledge that are required for the jobs that your good grades can get you.

My exams are next month.....so if any doubt arises thwt time i would really feel horrible if i won't be able to find my answers

And by the way i m just a 10th grader

Oh no! I suddenly feel guilty. Quick, post all your questions so we can do them for you! (/sarcasm)

@Abcd We are willing to help you with answers, but the purpose of the site is not to spoon-feed you information which you can just regurgitate in your exam - it's to help you understand biology: this is why we have the rule of needing effort

@Abcd you know what really amazes me about your attitude and complaints? It's that you somehow feel entitled to dump your school assignments on a random website so that strangers will answer them for you because you're too goddamn lazy to do the work yourself. Do you really think you have a right to expend no effort on your own and have other people answer all your questions in little bite-sized pieces for you? You, my friend, are going to have a very rude awakening when you discover the real world.

A 10th grader just discovered an ancient mayan city by collaborating with a space agency and using academic literature and his own prize-winning idea. Saying you're a 10th grader doesn't grant you the right for people to have to spoon feed you.

You, my friend, are going to have a very rude awakening when you discover the real world. I, now, really feel pity for him/her, just thinking what he/she will do after realizing that its too late for any forum in the world to help him/her (sorry if this concerns you, I just couldn't stop myself on this one) :/

Your misinterpretation of biology.se
First of all, what I feel like that you are misunderstanding here, is that you think it is our duty to be on biology.se, and that we are probably even getting paid for it. This is incorrect.
What biology.se is about
The active people on here are here to have an exchange about/on biology, and if possible help people. However, about the helping part, there are very clear guidelines, which you should read before posting anything.
What to do for the future?

Read the how to ask a question section from the help center
Take the tour, there is a reason why it exists

There you will come across this:

Have you thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your question? Sharing your research helps everyone. Tell us what you found and why it didn’t meet your needs. This demonstrates that you’ve taken the time to try to help yourself, it saves us from reiterating obvious answers, and above all, it helps you get a more specific and relevant answer!

In your case, some of the questions you posed can really be answered by some rather quick google searches.
This isn't a let me post my question without having done any research before and expecting the community to do my work forum.
From the help center:

What should I do before I ask the question?
Research it yourself - even if you try and can't find the answer or understand the concept you need you can then include what you have found out yourself in the question.
  Search the site to see if something similar has been asked before.
How should I ask my question?
  Give full details of the problem.
  Include details of how you have attempted to form a solution. We will not do your homework assignments for you but we will point you in the right direction if you have made the effort to research the topic first.
  Use logical and clear formatting as this will increase your chances of getting an answer. For example, include tasks from your assignment in blockquotes.

In your case, you really have to work on the formatting of some of your questions. Examples: (1,2,3) (note that some of the questions have been edited by other users)
NB: as suggested by @remi.b as a comment on your latest question "please don't try to make us feel pity for you"

We do answer homework questions.
Nobody has mentioned this thus far. We actually do answer homework questions, which is somewhat unusual for stack exchange.
I am generally tolerant to homework questions; there have been interesting & impactful homework questions in the past and there will be plenty more to come. These range from zoology, to bioinformatics, to biostatistics.

Who are humans' closest relatives, after primates?
What is the optimal frame size for protein secondary structure prediction methods?
Deciding between chi-square and t-test.

Why many homework questions aren't being answered.
Not many homework questions stay open for very long here. Incidentally the most common close reason by a mile is homework. This is primarily because of relatively new users posting questions that appear to be straight form an assignment without any attempt at an answer. In the future, use these steps as a rule of thumb if you need help with a part of your educational course:

Have I read around? In your question, post what you have read.
Have I asked someone I know with expertise like a teacher or a colleague? Probably quicker, and more able to pinpoint exactly what you don't understand. Post what you learned from that discussion.
Have I attempted a reasonable answer? Post this in your question too.
Have I added the homework tag? This transparency is a sign of good faith & will encourage answers that explain things with less jargon.

If this question has arisen because of some educational course content, an additional step is to ask if it would count as cheating to ask for help.

Note that this does not guarantee your question will stay open. If the community feels that it is too trivial, off-topic, unclear, or if it appears like you're attempting to cheat then the question will likely be closed.
Why your questions aren't being answered.
I think previous answers sum it up and go into detail more than I would want to. Your questions are being challenged and closed because you have not shown a good-faith attempt at an answer. What is the advantage in helping you if you aren't willing to go through the steps above?

People preparing for their exams should be given their answers.

This type of self entitlement completely undermines the legitimacy from the "we should answer homework" argument. It incidentally damages the communities perspective of answering useful homework questions.
You've attracted a lot of negative votes here. This is only partially because of what you're asking. The way you have asked your question involved you making some offensive and unfounded assumptions about members of this community:

We're not as busy as you during your exams.

Assume that the answerer will be more busy than you. The prominent users of this site include world leading researchers, academics, industrial experts, and other knowledgable experts that have lots of other more important things to get on with.

Your time is more valuable than ours.

By virtue that you are asking a question, the answerer's time is more valuable.

You deserve an answer regardless of how clear the question is.

It's up to you to make your question stick to the guidelines and be up to the community standards. Homework questions suffer from the xy question problem because the asker has no idea about exactly what they don't understand. It's important that an answerer knows exactly what the asker is asking.

Side note; homework isn't unusual on SE. It's just that meta.SE is typically SO themed, and the homework tag is burned on SO with extreme prejudice (after the Death of Meta Tags)

Different biology enthusiasts are on different educational level. A layman or a teenager's question might come off as homework attempt. Instead of making new people feel unwelcome, how about erring on the side of caution and answering all valid questions which don't contain "help, homework, urgent keywords"? Then in the future the obvious/done questions as easily closed as duplicates. As a side benefit, having the obvious and less advanced question/answer sets would bring a lot more search engine traffic and make this place bigger, richer.


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Hated here...? Should I unsubscribe?
My question has been down-voted, at least three times (I'm not a high-k user and thus unable to see by whom, not even able to see the number of up/down-votes, only the outcome.)
I'm really pissed off by that, is there a possibility to delete all my previous actions (Q,A, Comments) and just leave you all by your own?
Edit: I really want to quit.
I deleted questions with no answers all right, but I'm not allowed to
delete questions that have answers.

First, we do not hate you; Second,  don't worry too much about downvotes - read this meta post; Third, could you link some of your downvoted questions, perhaps I was one of the downvoters - happy to elaborate quickly if applicable. Fourth; deleting answered questions can be done only by mods, and should be prevented at all times. However, anyone can delete their account, if I am not mistaken, but why should you?

Just for the record - since you specifically ask - yes, you can delete your account. See my answer to this meta question for further information.

Try to stick around a bit longer though, and ignore the occational downvote. Several of your questions are clearly appreciated by the community.

@fileunderwater 3 consecutive down-votes within about 5 minutes after posting clearly tells me that there is something wrong. None of the down-voters leaving any hint on "why" that would give me any chance to improve rings some bells, reminding me of stackoverflow.

You are not hated
Most of your questions are upvoted. The three downvotes you are talking about are on your highest voted question. Nevermind. It has much more upvotes.
Nobody can see who voted on their posts, including the mods.
Sometimes some people may downvote for incomprehensible reasons. Happened with me and many other high-rep users too. So don't worry.
Don't take a petty downvote to your heart.
Sometimes some people may have genuine reasons for downvoting something. Some people would comment along with the vote so that you may improve the post. However, that is not an obligation.
If you want to ask why a question of yours was closed (put on hold) then you can ask in meta.

touche, well said.

"Nevermind. It has much more upvotes.": those are compensational up-votes. (I don't think the question is good enough to have more than about 2 real up-votes). But I have not yet been told why it would deserve 3 down-votes in a very short time. I can't improve if feedback is only by anonymous ass-kicking.

I second WYSIWYG -

First, we do not hate you;
Second, don't worry too much about downvotes - read this meta post. Downvotes are an integral part of SE and in fact, Bio has a strong tendency for very conservative downvoting (and quite conservative upvoting too, for that matter);
Third, could you link some of your downvoted questions, perhaps I was one of the downvoters - happy to elaborate quickly if applicable.
Fourth; deleting answered questions can be done only by mods, and should be prevented at all times. However, anyone can delete their account, if I am not mistaken, but why should you?
Last, my first questions and answers were shot at too - it is the ones that deal with criticism in a positive way and integrate it as part of a learning curve that eventually make it up high in the food chain as active and valuable members of this community. Bringing this up in meta is a good first step in that process. Do not take downvotes personally. It happened now, it will happen again; it is an integral part of the SE philosophy and is meant to allow, and push users to improve their contributions.


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How can I open a closed question?
I have edited this question which was put on hold previously. Is there any possibility of opening the question. If there is,how?

There is a way: Closed questions can be nominated for re-opening by users which have at least a reputation of 3000 (see here for details.
You can also ask in the chat for someone to help you.


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Can I ask questions about the practice of biology?
Naturally, we expect on a site like this that biology itself is discussed. But what about related things that concern biologists?
What I do know is that:

Equipment recommendations are off-topic, a good thing, I think.
The history of biology is on-topic, also a good thing.
Questions about teaching biology can be on-topic, also a good thing.
Questions tagged protocol, image-processing, protocol, and research-process all exist.

I think it would also be good if we could ask about specific things that would concern biologists of various kinds. For example, I have a specific question regarding insect preservation that would concern entomologists. I imagine other questions like lab procedures, cataloging formalities, and specimen acquisition would be very useful questions and attract practicing experts.
Are these questions allowed?

I couldn't wait and asked the question: How to protect my mounted insect specimens from ... insects?

Your question looks like it was fairly well received, so I guess you have your answer! Speaking of which, please remember to accept one of the answers to your question and click the arrow next to it, turning it green. This marks the question as resolved to your satisfaction, and awards reputation both to you and the person who answered. If you have >= 15 reputation points, you may also upvote the answer (and even others) if you wish. There is no obligation to do either.

There are lots of question tagged with 'techniques'

Questions about the practice of biology are absolutely on-topic. In fact, there's a tag lab-techniques dedicated to it, and possibly others for other non-lab biological practitioners as well. This site is of, by, and for biologists, and many good questions relate to the day-to-day of our work:

How long can I store extracted RNA?
How can I label cryotubes in a way that eliminates the problem of legible hand-writing?
Does the Petri dish lid orientation on workbench affect aseptic technique?
What is the best way to express two proteins in a mammalian cell?
Basic step by step methods for PCR & Gel electrophoresis class

and many, many more. There are also a plethora of questions regarding how to do theoretical genetics, online database searching and analysis, phylogenetic classification, sample collection in "the real world" (i.e., outside the lab), and others. If it directly relates to a branch of biology, go for it!


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How to suggest a Tag-edit without making any change in the main post?
Whenever I try to do any tag-edit  for the first-time-on-a-question, an error-message comes "your edit should contain change in at-least 6 characters".
When a little tag-edit-suggestion could make a great improvement to the question, where-as I have nothing to change on the main-question, what should I do?
(Also, I could alter a few words keeping the meaning of the question unaltered, but I feel this unfair since I had no intention to do that change in main question. Also, many other Stack sites doesn't require any edit on main post to do a tag edit. Could that be done for this community?)
Update:

Sometimes it takes the tag-edit easily (as said by user@AliceD). In some cases it show warning for few edit-save attempts but then saves the edits. And in some cases it really don't take the edit. I really don't understand the mechanism behind this. Maybe there is a reputation dependent privilege.

In a recent answer I did a very minor edit (Procaryote -> proKaryote) and it brought exactly same warning message; "Edits must be 6 characters at least, is there anything to improve?" near the edit description field.

I really had not to do any more modifications so I added some more blank spaces. It just changed the position of the message, from edit-description field to edit field. Nothing else.

I searched at the Help center such as entered in the seach box as "edit must be 6-charactere". But I found no article about this.
The second point is nothing about tag suggest; but the same message box is the cause.
..............................
UPDATE:
Got a typical example. .
Really mysterious... it happens only sometimes but not always.

I just happen to come across this post. I don't see any reason why you should not be able to change tags. It may have to be reviewed by others, depending on one's reputation.


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Are there any guideline about species-identification questions?
In this site are there any guideline about species-identification questions? Or any instructions about how to capture some important features of the organism (plant/animal/fungus/whatever)? How much should be the photograph's clarity? etc.
NB: I'm talking about this post from Earth Science, however that is about rock identification, not biology.

For those want to identify a specimen, yet could not find out a guideline.
There are a lots of interesting questions on identify X. But that often have a deficit of proper information.
However I have tried to made one sample, using common sense.

In General:

Try to photograph describe useful characteristics, such as possible good fingerprints.

Though it depends quite upon guess, it is different sort of patterns, as a crude example, phyllotaxy (leaf-arrangement) in plants, Legs in insects, Gills in mushrooms, etc.
Need-not to know or use any descriptive-terminologies or codes before asking. Could write in plain language. .

Text mention  the size, at least approximate size.

If available, try to focus the reproductive structures (specially when it is plant)

If available, provide image of the whole organism and special parts (for say vegetative and reproductive).

If available/ possible, provide clear-photos. Clear photos does NOT necessarily big photos (many kb or many pixels). It is possible to take clear photos within smaller file size.

Here are some tips for it.
a. use fast shutter speeds or speediest modes (such as sports mode)
b. If possible/ available /applicable, could try a tripod or stand.
c. If possible/ applicable, take photos on daylight.
d. Flash can interfere animal lifestyles, and sometimes officially forbidden. However when and where it is applicable (for say mushroom gills, tree barks etc.) could use that, with proper darkness or brightness settings in camera.
e. Sometimes compression or resize destroy lots of details. There is a trick to get better details in smaller file size.   open the image on screen, adjust the display-size, and screenshot it with a screenshot tool. (To achieve that file size with direct compression or resize often blurs the image and kills many detail).
f. If the organism of interest is not clearly distinguishable from background or something else, you could use arrow mark or such.

Mention the locality and season.

If possible, could give some image of dissected view (without harm the nature, such as one sample from a troop of mushrooms in your garden) .

for plants
Plants are easiest to observe, since they don't fly-away.
For them:

Try to capture photographs of whole-plant, the reproductive part (inflorescence and flowers/ cones/ sorus/ capsules etc), and some of the notable vegetative parts such as branching, phyllotaxy (leaf arrangement), leaf veins etc. You need not to use descriptive-codes to ask the question (that is task for answerer), just include them in photograph. Keep it simple.

If the plant is not in flowering-condition, could wait for flowering if possible.
Try to avoid only a bunch of flower or only a short-portion of vegetative-body when you've scope to look at other-parts.
Best example I've ever seen here (SE), probably is this (hyperlink):
What is the name of this plant? .

If possible, dissect few flowers.
For a very basic idea, I hope, this, this , this could give a very basic idea about what to look for. You could give sections of fruit (including TS), that could give an idea of number of carpels.

If the plant is in a very young stage, if possible, let it grow.

If it is a seed or a cone or any-such material, if possible you could try to find the tree/climber etc it fallen from. Beside asking, You could try germinate the seed also.

(Germination could take a long time in cases. Once I planted some Bauhinia seeds whose seedlings were came out approx 2 years later they were put in soil! so don't lose hope.)

For twig-samples those shrink/rotten with time; in cases when you fail to photograph it readily, could press and dry it. You need not to paste it any herbarium-sheets; just press it so that important features remain observable.

You could keep it inside a fold of newspaper or magazine.
For a small, single specimen the task is very easy, but for more large, fleshy or multiple specimen the task become more difficult.  During the starting period, paper change at certain interval, requires. The frequency depends on many factors. For a very small specimen (say about 5 cm long herb), paper-change at 2 to 3 hour interval for 1 days, and then daily once paper change for 2 to 3 days or hardly an week, is usually more than enough (or sometimes no paper change may required at all). For larger, fleshier specimens or in humid weather, much higher rate of paper change is required, even up to 1/2-hour interval on starting-day and then 1 or 2 or 3 hour interval for an week or more may required. Do not use iron but could use hair-drier for non-professional work.

For Animals
It is most challenging and luck-factor works a lot. Because animals change their place, an often in high-speed. Even a quite hazy shot is often an enough lucky shot. such as this and this.
But what you could

Appropriate settings in camera.

a. Try use sports-mode or any-such mode that can take successive photographs.
b. Use faster shutter-speed
c. Take several-photographs and select clearest-few, and those-few focusing special features structures.
d. Flashlight is forbidden officially in certain places and it could irritate various animals including mammals and wasps etc. However for bugs, moths, worms etc entered into home, could be photographed using flashlight, those usually doesn't attack in flash.

Observe attentively about those-feature you missed in photographs/ not possible to include on photograph.

** Macro- fungus:**
Fungus identification is undoubtedly difficult. It requires lots of experience and practice, too. Moreover it is practically impossible and dangerous to conclude from about certain strain of fungus is edible or not - just from eye-gaze. Because very slight difference in taxonomic position under same genus, could have huge difference in biochemical compounds.
However just for knowing-purpose, upto genus or species rank, keen observation on detailed structures help a lot.

What to focus in the photograph:

*a: Habit in nature : on which substrate it has grown on? Single or in a troop? how much distant the fruit-bodies are? etc.
*b: Detailed structure: Focus on as much as possible extreme details. Cap, stipe, volva, cap-edge  etc everything. If possible to bring one at home, must include a zoom-image of gills/ pores. Do some LS of cap and stipe and TS of stipe. Note is there any hollow-chamber or not.  Notice colour of inner flesh. Photograph whatever seems important.
Wash hand carefully after watch. Best if plastic-gloves used while work. Stop direct touch if any irritation or allergy etc take place.

What to mention in text- details, specially those are not captured in photograph. Such as it was slimy or papery or hard-like-wood or leathery etc. If there any special smell, you could mention it. If any color-change, luminescence etc seen, mention that.

Place and time (season) quite a must to mention when it is fungus, and the time of day when the fruit-bodies flourish, is specific for many species.

Microscopic specimens
There is almost no-way to proceed a good distance from a macroscopic photo. However often there stays a way to guess from a spectrum, such as this-one. Information about affected organism/ substrate help in guess. Detailed observation on the microbial formation's property, including color, shape, size, smell (not recommended except strong enough to get from distance), texture (powdery/slimy/just color-changed patch on substrate, etc.) etc helps in such guess. (btw human disease / pathogens that can potentially affect human, is not appropriate for studying so casually).
If possible, a microscopic image at-least, is a must for microscopic specimen, as done for algae-identification by an SE user here.

When it is NOT better to post?

Identification from childhood memory etc.

Identification question without photograph.

Photographs not showing effort to collect some important fingerprints. (Plant photo lacking reproductive structures, branching, phyllotaxy, leaf veins,  close-up of tips, buds, axils etc. In case of mushrooms gills, stipe, base of stipe etc. In case of skulls or skeletons structural patterns including teeth, various folds etc)

Only photograph with no or poor text-information.

Identification of a small portion of body (teeth, feather, leaf etc) or a non-flourished body (a seed) etc. without any research-effort to find its source.

Highly distorted specimen (dried leaf, half-rotten animal etc).

Too unclear photograph when it was possible to give a clearer photographs.

in case of sound clips; too short/ noisy/both sound clip when it was possible to provide better.

In case of many organisms in a photo; or the target organism not well distinguishable from background; no marking in the photo about what to look for.

Fungus edibility queries.

Can you make this Community Wiki so as to encourage others to contribute their edits/suggestions? I've started copy editing it (spelling, punctuation, phrasing, etc.), but I don't have time to finish at the moment.

@MattDMo I've converted it into community wiki as per your request. Thanks, all additive edits are welcome.

I'm not fluent in English grammar, so, there could be mistakes. At the same time, sometimes grammatical mistake make my sentences apparently aggressive but that is just mistake in sentence construction. Such as in one of my question I wrote "please identify this insect", that was edited to "please help identify this insect", the right sentence I was trying to write. In this-question I wrote "I can make a guideline", but assuming some possible unwanted "pretension", I converted it "however I've  tried to make a sample".

no problem, I completely understand. There are a lot of non-native English speakers on Stack Exchange, so I do my best to "translate" and correct when possible. I would expect others to do the same for me if I was posting on a Spanish Stack Exchange, for example.

@MattDMo Here I posted


text:
Want to know commands (codes) for following formatting tasks
Want to know commands (codes) for following formatting tasks.

Degree Centigrade.
Subscripts and superscripts like CO2, 14N , (6C13)6H12O6.
Greek letters.
a portion of text, with special characters like stars, less-than, greater-than etc, that would not considered as a part of command (like nowiki command in wikipedia).
Displaying more-than 1 space-bars between 2 letters.

Also want to know, what-type of programming language? Surely it is not Wikicode. Is there any more-detail guidelines to handle this code?
Look how strange things a user has done on this website. Stack Exchange experimentation sandbox A big salute to that user.

There are two ways to do what you want: HTML Entities and MathJax. You can use HTML entities for characters like:

° °
α α
Α Α (note the capitalization)
λ λ

etc.

MathJax is basically a JavaScript implementation of $\LaTeX$ (that's $\LaTeX$ for those who are taking notes), a text formatting language. $\LaTeX$ itself is gigantic, so MathJax aims to implement a limited subset (still quite large) related to mathematics and other technical disciplines like chemistry. Rather than repeat a whole bunch of data presented elsewhere, here are some links:

MathJax basic tutorial and quick reference from the Math.SE meta site.
How can I format math/chemistry expressions here? from the Chemistry.SE meta site.
An online $\LaTeX$ Equation Editor

Finally, one quick hint that'll help you learn - if you come across something formatted in $\LaTeX$ on a Stack Exchange site (and possibly elsewhere online where they're using MathJax), just right-click on it and select Show Math As → TeX Commands and a popup will open showing the commands used, instead of having to edit the question/answer to see the source. Please also note you cannot use HTML Entities in MathJax, but there are symbols/commands for everything you'll need already built-in.
There are many $\LaTeX$/MathJax resources online, so if you get stuck, just Google.

Sometimes putting a star marks disrupt bold or italic portion.

@AlwaysConfused You can always use underscores to indicate bold and italic formatting - this is bold (__this is bold__), this is italic (_this is italic_), this is bold with a star* (__this is bold with a star*__).

I've found following things useful.
1. As a general-purpose, rapid, short command for subscript and superscript:
subscript and superscript in the edit field; gives rise to respectively subscript and superscript .
So; for example;

to write Cl2 ; type Cl2 .
To write 23 ; type 23
To write 6C12 or 126C ; respectively type  6C12 or 126C.
To write 12C6H12O6 or  13C*6H12O6, respectively;    type  12C6H12O6 or 13C*6H12O6.

Source and Courtesy: User @Terdon.

2. To type something that will not be treated as command:
there are 2 ways:

A. 4-successive space bars before the text.

But that adds a horizontal scroll-bar.

B. Quoting the text by covering it inside 2 backtick marks. This could be done inside sentence;

Source: seen while trying to understand the tools at visual edit toolbar.

P.S. At help page there is an article about correct formatting. Beginners need to go through it. I didn't knew about it and I took many days to search it out.
There is also a page on comment-formatting


text:
When this rare message comes?

The brown message... "Have you considered accepting an answer or starting a bounty for this question?" .
Many times I saw a question left for long time, but I rarely see this message, and it is only the second time I got it. What is the criteria when the site generate this message?


text:
Would there be more-specific SE branches (communities) for some broad branches of biology?
From these vast lot discussions (Scope differences between biology and (biological) anthropology , What is the most appropriate forum for Biochemistry questions? , Is this site open to questions that are essentially requests for help classifying individual organisms? , Biology.SE and professional biologists? , Is it on-topic to ask for the identification of any living organism? , Plant Identification Questions , Species Identification Questions ) it seems to me, there is a problem of information sorting. (Though I've yet not any problem because I visit all-sorts of questions) but the problem with information sorting is very normal because  biology is a very vast field with so-many branches. So peoples want to focus only a particular field (not following a tag... rather follow a stream, may be biochemistry or genetics or botany or zoology or palaeontology etc. etc.) would get their posts shielded with others' .
So, since peoples of all sub-fields of biology, have their right to take part in question-answer, yet that shields content of some-other streams; so I think the best solution is to make some new (beta) branches of Stackexchange, and biology.se , the original site, could be kept as more general questions and highly interdisciplinary questions.
As well, I've seen much deficit of proper tags for specific field,  with respect to  most other SE branches. For say, yet here (biology.se) there is yet no tags for some broad groups for plants like bryophyte, pteridophyte, gymnosperms, etc. The tag phycology (algae) I've created (though I don't knew then that, new-tag creation is yet not recommended for me!). So quite more specific branches in SE could resolve these.

I don't think it would work, because it'd require too many websites, 3-4 moderators for each site, newcomers will have to find out where they should ask their questions, etc, etc. Yet, its still just my opinion. Why don't you try that? Thats what Area 51 is for.

@another'Homosapien' that problem already exist. so-many times my-question (in other communities), moved to some-other community. Rather the whole stackexchange site on their main page could arrange subjects according to their relations. Some gross arrangement.

I agree with that (its happened with me too), but implying what you say would only increase the problem.

Why I'm increasing the problem when so-many people doing objection that their-question getting shielded in bulk of questions they don't want?

You mean Is there a shortage of moderators? Nothing to do but biology is broad subject and every field inside it have their right to take part in Q/A

Well there are ways they can hide them. Go to tag preferences and select to hide out ignored tags. Newcomers should see all questions before they set preferences.

Not now, but there would be a shortage if we have >100 biology sites, requiring a total of >300-400 dedicated moderators.

I told "some broad branches", like botany, zoology, mycology, etc. There would not be more than 10 or 12.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

I've already sent conversation to chat.

I don't understand what the underlying problem is. Biology is a relatively low-traffic site, especially when compared to the original trio of Stack Overflow, Super User, and Server Fault. Even on a busy day at work, I can generally still find time to read every single question posted on this site, yet on Stack Overflow I can maybe read 2 or 3% of the questions tagged python (more on the weekends, when the flow is slower and I have more free time).
If you are interested in only certain types of questions, it's incredibly easy to set up filters based on tags. You can add as many tags to a filter as you want, so you don't need to worry about missing a genetics question if it's only tagged molecular-genetics: just add both to your filter.
Based on the traffic, we absolutely do not need any more specialized biology-related sites. Our subject base is quite broad, and many different types of questions from many different fields are welcome here (obviously, assuming they meet our criteria of topicality and scope).
I am against creating new tags unless (as a general rule of thumb) you can tag at least 10-15 existing questions with it, if not more. Just because your question is about a specific sub-field does not mean it needs an incredibly specific tag - immunology is just fine, we don't need t-cells, b-cells, nk-cells, splenocytes, dendritic-cells, etc. etc. Likewise, we don't need a specific tag for each and every type of plant, animal, bacterium, archaeon, etc. Tags are for classifying questions and assisting in search, but Stack Exchange's search engines also include full-text keyword searching, so if you want to find all existing questions on gymnosperms, just search.
If you truly feel like a new tag should be created, please post a question here about it and let the community weigh in. Link to all the previous questions you can find where the tag would be relevant and valuable. Explain how the new tag would add value to the site. If there's a good response, someone will create it. If not, or if there's no response, it's probably not a good idea.

Additionally there was a proposal on Area51 to set up a community for neurobiology. This was canceled as this would clearly overlap with biology and also because there is not very much neurobio traffic here at biology. Stackexchange wants to avoid establishing empty (or dead) communities.

@MattDMo No, I have no problem with all-sorts of questions (even I mentioned it in OP).  It seemed to me from several (quoted) discussions that many other users might having  some problem. But for me, all sorts of questions on this site is perfectly ok. I do-not filter any type.

@AlwaysConfused I don't think anyone has a problem. Questions from a certain branch of biology are not specifically ignored. We have participation from people with different backgrounds (and we hope that it will grow); so many topics do get covered. If you think this site is too broad then just visit quora once. You'll realize that this is heaven.

@WYSIWYG I've no problem here, I'm saying again. I've wrote on the beginning of my question that it seemed to me from many-others' discussions. If that 'seeming' is wrong; then plz feel free to mention that as an answer. I too love this site. Otherwise I would not participate here on nearly-regular basis (In only very little-other sites I can spend valuable time). ((however on most of that time, I only read the questions and answers)).


text:
Should we have some instructions/codes before asking anthropology question dealing with human races/ phenotypes?
Anthropology-related questions like this or this may fall in unwanted trouble regarding racism or politics or such-kind of complications.
So, before asking such kind of answer; how could we understand which terminologies may be considered as attacking/ racist/ hurting etc; and which are safe; and how could we make our sentences 'moderate', so that no-one feels inferior or superior.
So we should have some sort of guideline. Isn't?
Since by-definition science deals with truth; in subjects like anthropology, human-biology, genetics, genetic disease and their control, etc; inevitably every times there will come discussion about genetic variation in human races or populations. May it be about lactose-intolerance or sickle-cell-anaemia.  If we censor them out; world's knowledge would be tampered.
So we should have certain guidelines as well as certain amount of permissions too.
Isn't that?

The general guidelines I'd follow is avoid using terms which are derogatory or used to insult an individual belonging to a certain race. Also depicting one race more deserving than the other is racism. But , stating the facts of it without insult like Caucasians have larger bodies and eyes than east Asians is not at all racism as it merely states a biological fact. Finally lack of information or disinformation should not be racism as long as OP wishes to accept and correct the mistake. Everything else is racism for over-privileged snowflakes

but which comment might be derogatory, and which one not; could that be defined in logical terms? Also Someone may have lack in current vocabulary about 'derogatory'.  in this question; "red indian" was consedered as a racist word but once upon a time in our school exams on literature we used the term "red-indian". Maybe it was then not considered derogatory.

I think it was back when the minority rights were still  very poor and racism was still very prevalent in the united states. I'm sure a term which is known to be derogatory by very few people can be forgiven and considered as a mistake instead of deliberate insult, unless the user of that term is purposefully using it in an insulting context and refuses to acknowledge the mistake and make it clear that he had no intention to insult,

@user1062760 I'm pretty sure that quite a number of people still thinks this is a fair description of the current situation: "...when the minority rights were still very poor and racism was still very prevalent in the united states."

@fileunderwater perhaps! But atleast today the blacks have right to vote and can hold high ranks in the government as we saw with barak obama. Rascism still exists in the stated but compared to older times now there are laws against rascism which are often enforced as well. So not a solution but some improvement


text:
How to properly hyperlink in comments the hyperlinks that contains bracket?
To cite hyperlinks in comment; I use the command format:
Here's an inline link to [Google](http://www.google.com/).,
out of from total 3 formats.
I've experienced, if the link-address being cited, itself contains a pair of first bracket, it gives rise to a strange situation.
screenshot-1

( comment permalink )

( comment permalink )
So, my question is;  Is there any way to code them properly?

P.S.

The bug not affecting the answering. It is only affecting the commenting.
I do not use later-2 commands for commenting because...
I've tested the other 2 formats in commenting; but that doesn't work. such as :

Here's a reference-style link to [Google][1].  [1]: http://www.google.com/ gives rise to
screenshot  - 3

( comment example permalink)
and
Here's a very readable link to [Yahoo!][yahoo].  [yahoo]: http://www.yahoo.com/
screenshot-4

( comment example permalink) ;
So seemingly the later-2 format not for use in comments.

The parentheses in URL are not a problem: for example,
[text](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbel_(anatomy)) works fine in comments without any escaping. It doesn't work in yours because you typed something with a whitespace within the URL parentheses:
[text](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbel_(anatomy) something)

which of course broke the syntax.

The inline style text is the only option for comments. When a character contained in the URL gets misinterpreted, escape it with a backslash \: for example, \[ instead of [. But this doesn't seem to be necessary for parentheses and brackets.

url with round parens works correctly.

text

url with square brackets also works (the URL is invalid, but that's a different thing).

Hmm it working correctly. Seemingly subconsciously I was typing a space bar between last-2 closing bracket


text:
How to distinguish a question more appropriate for Biology-SE or CogSci-SE or Health-SE?
Recently going through this question (that has been put hold as off-topic; and commented for more appropriate to CogSci.SE) ; to me it looked highly like a biology (physiology) question such as this sleep-wake cycle question.
So it seems the border between Biology, Cognitive-science and Health(or medical-science); is very much blurry, interrelated as well as quite subjective.
So; do-we have some principle to technically/ officially consider a question as biology or cog-sci or health?

The first question is more or less opinion-based unless more background is provided. Certainly it is possible that diurnal animals are afraid of dark because many predators are nocturnal. The question does not delve into the evolutionary aspects and is more about a personal experience.

The second question has not even been voted for closure. It is on-topic but it also is poorly framed and sounds more like a personal experience. If it is about the biomolecules controlling the sleep-wake cycle then it is too broad. Overall, your examples are not justifying the title of your post.

@WYSIWYG I think answers to both of these questions could definitely fit in with neurobiology and belong here (though I also agree that neither is the greatest formulation of a question), and people are likely to get a different type of answer to them here than they would in cog-sci. As a neuroscientist myself I mostly stay away from cog sci because it is often a totally different approach to understanding - other neuroscientists would fall on the other side.