Norbert

Sort of like plants and bacteria do in response to antibiotics and pesticides/herbicides. I know that's not a good comparison, but I can't think of any better one. I'm interested in whether vertebrates can evolve immunity to heavy metals. Humans have been mining, handling and poisoning themselves (and the biosphere) with lead since time immemorial. We are constantly in contact with this dangerous metal. It is being released by aging homes, in mines, in industrial settings, etc. Do you think it's possible for the vertebrate body to evolve mechanisms for dealing with lead and other heavy-metal toxins? Perhaps by putting them to use like other metals such as iron or zinc? My apologies if this question seems silly, I am more of a math person.

This post is about an apartment I moved into in April. I guess the most obvious threats come from ingesting pant chips, inhaling dust stirred up by a sanding tool or licking the surface (if you're a child), but couldn't you also get considerable amounts of lead into your system by constantly inhaling air that came into contact with (was blown across and in between) peeling lead paint? For example, air that came through a window which had lead paint peeling off the exterior frame? This is my room window: As you can see, there are some pretty nasty lead paint peels coming off. There is also a black/grayish residue on the exterior sill, which I'm guessing contains lead in addition to dust and soot from the nearby road. I used to keep this window open at night as I slept. Occasionally, the wind would blow in small specs and pieces of lead paint. I simply picked them up with my bare fingers and chucked them in the trash. One time I was looking out of the window and hit my head on the frame, I'm sure that put a considerable amount lead dust into my hair and into the air I was breathing. I wasn't too concerned because I asked my landlord, before signing the papers, if there were any hazards in the unit that I should be aware of and he answered me with a pretty confident no. I took his word, silly me, but this kept gnawing at the back of my mind for 4 months. I finally decided to get the paint tested and it turns out to be high-content lead paint. WAY, I mean WAAAY above what the EPA allows. So my question is... can wind blowing across peeling lead paint dislodge enough lead particles and suspend them in the air to cause significant health risk? How readily do these organic lead compounds enter the air? Is wind blowing across it enough of a disturbance to get lead compounds airborne??? If I sat in this room with the window open for 4 months, how sick should I be? I don't have any symptoms, at least no obvious ones. I do feel a little more lazy than usual and I have an almost daily headache but I'm not sure if that's related to the lead or something else like mold in the building.

That is correct.

Good, at least I'm entering the room with a flickering candle I guess. So how many genes actually determine who we become?

When you do the research it seems that the general consensus nowadays is that race does not exist. That race is a "social construct". This is confusing because in the medical fields and in forensic anthropology, among others, race is very real. It is also very real when you step outside and observe the striking difference between, say, a German-American and a Mexican-American. Is this political correctness or is race really nothing more than a social construct? Here are my questions: 1. People who deny the existence of race always reduce it to skin-color. I think skin-color is the least accurate way to determine a person's race. A Japanese person and a German person might share a similar skin-color but their facial-bone structure and body proportions are completely different, hence they belong to two different races. A northern Indian and a Pole might not have the same skin-color but they share similar facial-bone morphology and have similar body proportions. They are both Caucasoids. The way I understand it is that race is more than skin-deep. Race is determined by bone structure and skeletal proportions. The facial-bone structures of African black people, Mongoloid Asians and that of Caucasoid Europeans and Middle-Easterners are very different, even if there is significant overlap in skin-color. These skeletal differences are obvious. Are these differences not genetic? 2. People who deny race often say that the genetic difference between two people of the same race is often greater than the genetic difference between two people of different racial backgrounds. What does this mean exactly? It's very general and could mean anything. Can two Japanese people who look practically identical be more different genetically than a Japanese person and a Ghanan, for example? Can two family members who belong to the same race be more different than two unrelated people from different races? 3. Are two people who share the same height but are of different racial background really more genetically similar to each other than two people from the same race who are not of the same height? Is genetic similarity then not a valid way to measure relatedness?

First of all, let me just say that I am a total amateur at this. I know practically nothing. All I know is that each parent gives us 23 chromosomes and that there are something like 100000 genes altogether that determine who we become. I am interested in how we inherit genes, and particularly genes that determine our more obvious characteristics from our parents. I am referring to noticeable characteristics like facial-bone structure/facial proportions, skin-color, hair-texture, body proportions and height as well as less obvious characteristics like blood-type, susceptibility to and/or immunity to certain diseases, etc. Let me use a dramatic example, say a Japanese mother and an African father produce an offspring. The reason I chose this example is because there are obvious differences between their genes, judging by their physical differences. Okay, I know these differences are small but you can't deny them altogether. Their children would inherit half of their genetic information (23, right?) from their mother and the other half (the other 23, I'm guessing) from their father. These children would be perfectly bi-racial, half-Asian and half-black, unless crossing over would take place. Is this right so far? Okay, now lets say one of these children met and married another person of first-generation bi-racial Asian/black ancestry and had children with them. Now it gets more complicated. The genetic information will get assigned randomly, from what I've read. These children will get some black and some Asian genes from their mother and some black and some Asian genes from their father. They can therefore be as much as ~100% Asian or ~100% black (theoretically) or anywhere in between. Is this right?

Hi everyone. I am interested in learning more about biology and chemistry. I have just completed my bachelors in pure mathematics.