Well the anesthetic would also serve to keep the animal still, regardless of what sensations it might perceive if not anesthetized. Not flopping or gasping during brain surgery is kind of necessary. I've had to do eye surgery on small fish, and if they started waking up and flopping around it would be impossible to…

Lower arches are generally stronger than higher arches, but in ballet, the aesthetics trump all. Irish dance is so different- both the hard and soft shoes help define the look of an arch already. Also the commonly desired Irish dance point holds the foot so much straighter than in ballet, where the "best" pointed feet…

Wow. Your story makes me very sad that you were told so much nonsense and that it kept you from ballet. I have awful feet, but I've been lucky enough to enjoy a lifetime of dancing (and hell yes, men's class jumping, thank you booty power) for my own personal betterment. Of course, I'm no professional, but I still…

Hello classmate :o) I graduated that year too! My favorite part of that whole gradutirement debacle was the "parties" he held in the dorms just before commencement, passing out items with his face all over them. I still have a couple of the SJT temporary tattoos; I think I kept them because no one would believe me…

Fully agreed, as a dark chocolate snob, and when I realized it's made with palm oil I wrote it out of my life entirely.

I had something like the initial instance occur when working as a cashier in a convenience store. I had accidentally accepted one or two counterfeit twenties, and alerted my manager when I fully realized. She told me to try to get rid of them as change. I opted to keep them in my drawer and throw them in the safe when…

I'm so glad to hear someone else can feel exactly where they need to reapply sunscreen while exposed to the sun! My friends never believe that I can spot-check by feel. As for the expense of the sunscreen, you could try a less expensive type/SPF value on one arm for a little while just to see whether it measures up. I…

I wonder how similar cats and dogs might be, and whether sex associations of paw preference are real. I've seen papers refuting the sex differences in dog laterality (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1681564…) but also seemingly strong evidence for it in cats (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2220137…). Very…

Yes, that was a big durr for me when reading... dog laterality is a well-documented phenomenon and has been used in behavioral assessments for candidates for dog jobs (guide dogs, etc). It seems somewhat debated, but is at least an observable trend. Ex: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2202385…

I've been buying Men's Mitchum for years, and at the stores I buy at, it is absolutely at least $1.50 less, and the men's stick is a bit larger than the ladies'. What a racket.

My mom is the same way. As soon as she sees whatever pre-planned tricks or bs papers they're going to show her, she just says "I know this is bs. Please give me the figures for what I want, no other persuasion necessary." I think it's hilarious.

I JUST bought my first car and picked it up yesterday. It was just me doing it. I told them this was not my first car purchase. It was ok, I had my research done and got what I wanted out of the car that I was considering (found it on cars.com). They did get me on one thing, though: they offered me a wraparound…

Was dating a guy for a little while, and was over at his house one weekday afternoon. I was looking at the pictures on his fridge (he was an older guy with lots of family all over the country), and I asked if so-and-so was his niece, nephew, or whatever other family member he had described to me, and then got to a…

I have a tattoo on the back of my knee, and the needling over the tendons back there made my leg jump SO MUCH that the artist had clamp down on my leg with another shop employee holding my foot down. Luckily this method resulted in no errors, but I felt bad to chain these guys to my leg to hold back my reflexes. Ouch…

Actually, there is a significant mixup happening here when comparing cutoffs from other organizations: namely, that there are two major steps to confirming a positive drug test, and the cutoffs for each test are different owing to the differing accuracy of the two different tests. The initial screen limit is 50 ng/ml.…

My source is having worked in a drug testing lab and doing the marijuana metabolite testing myself. It sticks around stably just fine at RT for several days (though it is of course frozen); it's an organic compound but not a protein like FGF. Its stability is more akin to, say, steroid hormones in solution. I don't…

I used to work for Quest. I think it's getting mixed up by the fact that there is first an immunoassay screen, which is kind of like a semiquantitative assay. It gives you a ballpark figure but it's fairly imprecise, and the cutoff for the screen you link to is 50 ng/mL to send to confirmations. The confirmation test…

That's pretty low. I used to see 5 ng/ml as a standard cutoff for medical professionals getting on-the-job testing.

I also worked at a drug testing facility in the confirmations area, and never saw a limit above 15 ng/mL. 15 was typical, 5 was sometimes the case for certain clients, and LOD was the absolute lowest I ever saw. I wonder if there is a difference in standards by geographical location or just by independent company.

Marijuana metabolite stored in a urine sample will not break down in a few days (or hours, as was likely the time period between these two testings). Especially when frozen, as is standard policy in such labs. The difference is due to two separate extractions, and two separate instrument calibrations (for analysis by…