They are correct that Americans in general do not eat enough fish. That's not just special interest group stuff.

You are correct- certain kinds of commercially available tuna have higher mercury content that others. Although, I'm not sure if the panel means albacore is a special case so don't eat it or if they mean it is a special case so they should eat it. Accordign to the FDA's publically available stats, albacore is one of…

Actually, learning how to better communicate the risk-benefit thing is a major area of research precisely because of what you described. If we make it too confusing people are just like "well fuck this then" and don't bother.

You can earn a BS (I have a BS in chemistry from a liberal arts college). The research facilities depends a lot on the school. My school didn't have huge facilities, but we did pretty well getting students into the labs and getting experience doing research and we went to conferences and all that good stuff.

In undergrad, working under top researchers isn't as important as getting research lab experience PERIOD. I currently am a grad student at an R1 and I would guess that, as a percentage, more students in the sciences did undergrad research at my little liberal arts college than the undergrads I teach here.

I went to a smaller, less well known women's liberal arts college. We weren't terribly selective to get in (partly due to the size of the school- needed the enrollment), but we were pretty hardcore once you got in. We had a particularly solid science program with lots of research opportunities and I got into my PhD…

You're pretty much spot on. "I don't want to overwhelm their immune system while it is still developing" is usually the thing I hear from people who insist on delaying vaccines. Of course, I'm like 95% sure that "immune system is still developing" is why we give vaccines when we do, since the whole point is basically…

I also watched the hell out of that as a kid. My grandma watched us a lot and didn't have cable, but she did have boxsets of Are You Being Served? and Keeping Up Appearances. We liked them (more so Are You Being Served?, but the other one wasn't bad) and started watching them when PBS did British comedy blocks.

Photography and videography would be a time this would be applicable as a good example! The value of white balancing, ya'll. Someone on io9 said they were doing some kind of physics lesson on wavelength and the visible spectrum, so they were going to use it as an example, too.

Awesome! My teacher had previously done grading for the APUSH exam, but she honestly was still just okay. APUSH had an average score of 3 at my school (I got a 5 though). Compare to AP Euro, which I had taken the year prior to APUSH, where our teacher was on top of it to an amazing degree. Our final for the class was…

Maybe not ALL the credit, but probably way more credit than is due. As I recall, they're definitely more favorable than the AP Euro book I'm describing, where you could just feel the writers rolling their eyes in his direction. The Young Republicans I mentioned were so mad all year about how our textbook was like…

Your APUSH sounds so much cooler than mine! I also did well, but I think that's because I took AP Euro the previous year (which, as I explain elsewhere, is where the real America hating, or at least "America- not as important as you think!"-ing takes place). Our APUSH was way more in line with stereotypical US history…

I was going to say that if they are that worried about a history class making the US look bad, forget APUSH, go after AP Euro. That's where I got most of it from!

This is also true.

Because the kid can't get vaccinated until she's 2 months old, which is why she specified that they were doing that until the kid hit that age.

Thanks! It's fresh in my mind- I just stumbled across Jenny Trout's 50 Shades recaps a week or so ago (I had missed them earlier) and read through them and have been ranting angrily about it every since. But, in between recaps, she talked about deciding to work on that book. I think Mara Wilson recommended it during…

I know that Jenny Trout (although she publishes under a different author name) who did the 50 Shades recaps wrote a book called The Boss that attempted to take the basic plot of 50 Shades and just do everything right that James did wrong. So like, all the dub con stuff is gone, for one thing. It's still not a genre…

SNOWQUEENS ICEDRAGON. I will never forget because I laugh literally every time I think of it. It's just so beautiful. It's like a parody of a fanfic writer's name.

Really the only way to save this was if halfway through it turns out the movie is a thriller and not a romance. Basically, you don't have to change anything except the framing the audience is meant to see it.

My friends and I regularly discuss how fics like "That Ocean is Not Silent" would provide excellent material for the actual upcoming Pacific Rim 2. There are dozens of other fics out there in basically any fandom that are just SO MUCH better than 50 Shades in every possible way.