I'm definitely worried about the larger costs in the system of that kind of testing...

I'm wondering the SAME THING as a medical student. As we've started doing physical exams, I'm becoming really aware of how much obesity is going to impact my ability to provide good care. I mean, the research and everything is one thing, seeing patients with mobility issues related to lifelong obesity was another…

Maybe I've worked in too many nursing homes, but being a teenager with a seventy year old parent sounds exhausting. Even people in great health can have accidents at that age that leave them completely dependent—you should see some of the minor accidents that broke hips or fractured vertebrae and how people who…

You mean that a business model that involves selling extreme visual access to women's bodies particularly in the context of an industry that is not technically "sex work" often results in the actual sale of sex?

Thankfully (or not if you like library sex), they're not private at all. Pictures from Huffington Post show an alcove (so not even a room with a door) with several cots set up in it.

Remember that it's a restaurant. I don't know if you've spent much time in the back of one, but food is packaged very differently than on grocery market shelves. When sold it bulk the individual packages within boxes are frequently unlabeled. The containers are often opaque silver or white plastic bags with just a…

That's the breeding. They have abnormally short legs. Think like a dachsund, except instead of being bred slowly into a weird conformation over several generations they're a spontaneous mutation that probably affects growth factor sensitivity or something. Apparently it isn't true dwarfism exactly. The wikipedia…

Apparently they're not completely dwarves, but the mutation is homozygous lethal. So basically if you breed two of them together, a quarter of offspring are not viable and a quarter are not munchkins. Presumably for the sake of health you'd breed non-munchkin to munchkin... but then you'd be getting half of offspring…

And munchkins of all things, too. They're really cute, sure, but the health of them is a considered a bit dubious/controversial. I'm sort of uncomfortable with breeding animals in a way that compromises their mobility or purposefully introduces a lethal mutation just for the sake of appearances. After all, munchkins…

Yeah... this is one of those evolutionary psych moments where they're just totally free-wheeling speculation. Like, how can I come up with a reason that ANYTHING might be an evolutionary advantage?

UGH. I KNOW. I actually had someone tell me that I "needed to get out more" when I mentioned that I had never been out of the country. I'm so sorry that I've been working since I was sixteen and cannot afford to take the time off my hourly wage jobs. At least growing up I felt "normal", but once I was at an Ivy League…

I hated it because it was slooow. So much less material got covered when that material got turned into a group project.

I thought EVERYONE hated cooperative learning? At least, bitching about group projects is pretty gender-neutral. Competitive learning, on the other hand, was the shit. I used to pick one kid in every class to beat. For no reason at all.

I've never understood all of the Taco Bell hate. It feels just like an extension of general weird criticisms of Mexican food—"Mexican... basically dog food amirite?!" I've worked for Taco Bell, and I have friends and relatives who've worked at other fast food joints. It's basically the same shit different business. We…

You're not missing anything. It's one of those things where the idea of the correlation is exciting but the actual meaning of it is sort of "meh". At least as far as I can tell.

If it's any help, my SO made the switch... and it basically involved a LOT of self-study because the classes were often behind the current statistical techniques. It also involved increasingly just refusing to do molecular work. Molecular takes time, and ambitious people don't want to do it because it isn't as…

What they're getting at is that there is no uniform answer to that. Every living thing with a genetic code has some parts of that code that are more actively "read" than other parts, and methylation is one of many tools that the system has for marking what should or shouldn't be "read" and how often. Methylation…

There's certainly something to be said about people demanding medical tests that their history doesn't justify... For example, expert panels in multiple countries have concluded that pap smears need to be done less frequently, and yet many people seem to be psychologically attached to the idea that they need an annual…