Text adventures used to be hard!

I can watch an episode of House and anticipate "they obviously have lupus", which makes me feel intelligent and satisfied even though I can see they are planting obvious clues from the very start which a diagnostician would be mind-numbingly stupid to ignore.

The same with the headline of this article. It's designed that way. In reality, you don't get to read the headline or watch the episode before making a clinical decision.

Regarding House: in mid-series episodes, I believe they occasionally subvert this by planting clues for the wrong thing. At least, I enjoyed being wrong in those episodes.

Assuming chromosomes are inhereted whole, the probability that siblings share less than 25% DNA - the equivalent of one further generation away - is 0.00531 (0.5% chance).

But chromosomes are not inherited whole - they recombine. This hugely reduces the probability even from that start point.

Even if it's now possible/cheap, that's a recent development.

mtDNA is good for finding your (maternal) ancestral group, less so for your immediate relatives.

1. Mitochondrial DNA is less apt than regular DNA to accurately identify motherhood since it has a low mutation rate.

2. The mitochondria would still come from the chimeric cells which still are a generation away from the mother's cells.

3. If you have have considered the possibility of chimerism, there are much simpler tests - e.g. the tests that they did do.

Chimerism is well-studied because it's biologically interesting, but most social/medical professionals are not expected to come across human chimerism in their whole career.

Chimerism not often documented in humans and the other possibilities (e.g. surrogacy scam) are hugely more probable explanations.

Chimerism is a possible explanation but vanishingly unlikely. Two identified cases, ever (i.e. none before this).

This is news because it's exceptional.

If the mother was chimeric, she would be chimeric with a 'twin' from the same (grand)mother and father. Therefore her 'twin' chimera would share 50% of her DNA, as any regular sibling.

This would be identifiable on a DNA test as a close relative: she would be genetically equivalent to an aunt rather than a mother.

It's also surprising that they had to test the thyroid when the gametic cell line is the important one (wikipedia suggests they tested her cervix).

It is not exactly clear (on the website) what you mean by 'rejected', so the English text could be improved to make your meaning more explicit. Perhaps 'returned' would be better?

Good luck!

On reflection, this does seem like a better system. I had imagined a silent fail as per other popular e-mail hosts.

IMHO the rule is good, but you don't have to offer the same rate for each job. If there's a job that benefits you, work out what how much that benefits you and quote the appropriate rate. If there's a job that doesn't benefit you, double your normal rate.

Clients insisting on negotiating the rate is a negative signal. It may be a signal that they don't value your work at the rate you're quoting, and this is often a signal that they won't value your work. It may be a signal that they are under financial pressure (i.e. it's high risk for you). Better clients might ask for a discount but normally will agree if you stick to the quoted rate.

My interpretation is: Spam is deleted in order to give you plausible deniability that you haven't received and read it.

i.e. There is no spam folder.

But, this seems like it would normally be a bug rather than a feature.

A more correct test (which admittedly doesn't cover this issue) would be to give each judge a conversation with one human and one computer, and for them to say which one they believe is the human.

If you're spending your time saving easily recoverable $5ks, you might get to be a millionnaire but you will never get to be a billionaire: it's totally irrelevant on that scale.

Equivalent statement: You don't get to buy a house without picking pound coins up off the street.

You can pay for this digger in an hour, by spending that hour sitting on your ass, and it's not that you will be re-spending that money in your lifetime anyway. Fill it in or have someone salvage it, do whichever is quicker: you've got other things to do with your life and one of those things is to enjoy your new pool.

(Whether true or not, this acts as a good illustration of the scale of income inequality)

There are presumably technical differences in how this data is stored and processed over time, which may not be insignificant.

Delete data today and it might be wiped; delete data tomorrow and it might be parcelled into a company takeover.

This is possible but not very likely in reality.

We expect evolution to be incremental, for the following reasons:

First of all, it's very unlikely that any mutation would get to "Surprise! Lethal!" venom unless the species is already geared up to produce something venom-like, and also to store venom and to protect itself from its own venom. There's a whole bunch of new functions that are needed to be venomous, and it's vanishingly unlikely that they will all suddenly appear at the same time, even at evolutionary scale.

IMO mutations normally have small positive effects and large negative effects: they are more likely to delete or - if you're lucky - alter some existing function and very unlikely to build a whole new function (compare: a small random change to your computer code).

Even if super-lethal venom was to somehow appear overnight, then in order to reach 100% prevalence it must provide such an immediate advantage that the non-lethal spiders die out and only super-lethal spiders proliferate.

But the non-lethal spiders were surviving pretty well in order to reach that point. So, there's no reason to believe the non-lethal spiders were in particular danger or that lethal venom was needed - normally, the "Surprise! Lethal!" variant line would just quietly die out (as almost all variants do) leaving the wild non-lethal type.

As I say, the random mutation explanation is possible but not really practical.

A far more plausible scenario is an "arms race" - where venomous functions develop over time, while predators and prey develop immunity over time - as the predators (honey badger) start evolving coping mechanisms, stronger venom is needed.

I believe you are probably right about this: but the spider venom was probably developed in an arms race with some {predator/prey} species. In your 'tarantula hawk' example, the venom must work on the tarantula, and the tarantula must do its evolutionary best to protect itself from the venom. This combination allows the venom to become extremely effective.

Or, given that it's the black "widow", maybe the venom is a result of sexual selection[0], which tends to have crazily extreme results. A spider fetish, if you like.

But, the sting/venom is not designed for humans (it just happens to work on them), and humans as a species have no reason to develop better protection. Humans typically aren't a target of the bites and almost always recover with no long-term effect. It isn't really designed to work on humans. But, it still hurts (and maybe that's a nice side benefit for a reclusive spider).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection

But... paying someone to make that prediction (even if you largely trust their authority) is not actually helpful.