speculatrix

Comment Threads

• farmfoodie commented on Black q-tips
  I worked for a pediatric ENT for quite some time. I recall him mentioning at one point that the chemical composition of earwax varied between a very large portion of the Asian population, and the rest of humankind. This was apparently based on a single gene variation between those two population groups. I can't remember the details exactly, but it may have been that Asian earwax (cerumen) was more or less "cheesy" than the stuff the rest of us produce. (OK, I know this sounds weird and gross, but ENTs do actually have a vocabulary to describe the consistency of...
• Nelson.C commented on Black q-tips
  Farmfoodie @15: From the Wikipedia article on earwax:There are two distinct genetically determined types of earwax: the wet type, which is dominant, and the dry type, which is recessive. Asians and Native Americans are more likely to have the dry type of cerumen (grey and flaky), whereas Caucasians and Africans are more likely to have the wet type (honey-brown to dark-brown and moist). Cerumen type has been used by anthropologists to track human migratory patterns, such as those of the Inuit. The difference in cerumen type has been tracked to a single base change (a single nucleotide polymorphism) in a...
• Takuan commented on Black q-tips
  the copepods always eat it before I see the colour...
• Nelson.C commented on Black q-tips
  I didn't know cephalopods had ear wax, Takuan. Or ears, come to that....
• Takuan commented on Black q-tips
  "cephalopod" is a term of convenience, as a courtesy to your kind's as-yet-undeveloped natural science....