Then you won’t believe this: it’s the Phil McGraw School of Medicine at RFK Jr. University. The dean is Dr. Mehmet Oz.

Cancer, and Wolf, refers to the old common term for cancer: wolf. It was thought to be a parasite that ate up the afflicted, like a wolf.

It’s the same as chrisomes. Infant mortality was so high, the ones who died without obvious cause just get lumped together by age group.

Chrisomes refers to those who died within the first month, during the time they’d be baptised. The baptismal cloth, the chrisome, would often be just as a burial shroud.

Teeth meant they were old enough to have one or more teeth, 6-24 months. Teething was thought to be potentially fatal because so many infants died during that period. Correlation, causation, yadda yadda yadda.

Did you ever play any of the early online 3D games where you could build your own little spaces? I remember one where you started in a central hub then could move to this endless plane of green space where people had built homes and similar. It was so empty of people yet full of random things. Nightmare material.

Just to preface, I’m a scientist: micro- and molecular biology. I’m not saying to take what I say as gospel, just giving context that I might know things. Sometimes.

Outbreeding depression has more possible implications than fertility decrease and infant mortality increase, entirely dependent on the heritable traits responsible for the depression effects. While the probability of persistent outbreeding depression seen in subsequent generationa would be lower due to traits subject to higher selective pressure, like increases in early infant mortality, the overall probability of outbreeding depression itself isn’t influenced post facto by its results, just its persistence.

Given we don’t know the original extent of neanderthal/human interbreeding, what we’re seeing now COULD be the “much lower percentage” you mention and still could come from multiple events. In fact, if these crosses resulted in stronger depression effects, I’d argue a greater number of crossings would be one factor behind the persistence of some genes today.

There ya go. It almost has too many squares.

Two ways.

First, sex chromosomes. In mammals, sex is determined by the sex chromosomes - males have XY, females XX. If interbreeding was equal between the sexes of both species, this would be reflected in the frequency of neanderthal genes on each chromosome in the current human population, but it’s more heavily skewed toward the Y chromosome than we’d expect if equal pairing was true. This suggests a higher proportion of successful male neanderthal/female human offspring.

Second, mitochondrial DNA. While genomic DNA in a sexually-reproducing species is a mix between the parents, in most mammals the inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is purely maternal. This is because only the egg’s mitochondria typically survive, though on rare occasion paternal mitochondria are also passed on. There is no known existent neanderthal mtDNA in the human population. This suggests either female neanderthal/male human crosses didn’t happen much and/or didn’t often produce offspring capable of further reproduction.

Of course, there are many other explanations for all of these. These are just amongst the simplest possible options, and in population genetics, it’s not uncommon that the simplest answers are frequently correct.

Keep in mind heterosis isn’t always the result of hybridization and even then the magnitude of isolation doesn’t always positively correlate. Outbreeding depression can also be the result, increasingly so when two groups are more genetically distant or when one group is already subject to heavy inbreeding depression, as the neanderthals were thought to be.

I can smell both this comment and the people that would seriously say something like this.

Is that an electrophoresis gel?

Oh fuck then I think we both might be autistic.

I see you have met my last boss!

Totally agree, it’s a harder to debunk way of protecting your time. Grandpa story time!

I follow something I call the rule of thirds. Of any three unverifiable improvements in workflow, two remain secret and they and their saved effort are solely mine while the smallest goes to the company. If I bust out 12 in a row, the company gets the smallest four. Maybe three if I’m feeling catty. I occasionally dole out one of the retained 2/3 when I need to look good for a review or something.

I learned this from an employer a few years back. I maxed out the first year and made a ton of improvements, so my first review was stellar. My second year’s review, though, noted that I hadn’t kept up with the previous year, so it was just a “meets expectations”. I was outperforming most of my peers, but not previous year me, so they thought I was starting to slack off. That’s when I realized many managers are idiots so you have to game the system if you want to succeed.

If you haven’t seen Vice Principals, I can’t decide if I should recommend it or warn you to avoid it. Both. Let’s go with both.

I’m allergic to coconut, so I would.

For anyone else not familiar, here’s the first line of Relooted’s description:

Reclaim real African artifacts from Western museums in this Africanfuturist heist game.

The forum is full of exactly what you’d expect.

I purchased two 12 TB HDDs last year when they were on sale and wow am I glad I did so. I joked how they’d last us the rest of our lives and now that might have to be true.

2025: IBM lays off 16-20k tenured employees.
Early 2026: “IBM emerges as a global leader (in asshole-tier cost savings), championing early career development by tripling their number of hired entry-level employees.”

Fuck you, IBM.

Interesting. You’re saying you can tell the difference between 320 kbps and FLAC? How long ago was this?