That’s not mold, but rather efflorescence. Water dissolves minerals, the water with dissolved minerals reaches the surface where the water evaporates and the minerals form crystals.

There’s water soaking into the concrete from somewhere (surrounding soil, likely).

Was it a fireball deck? That would explain it.

She got caught because she forgot to clear out a $1 million order? Really? This is a jewlery store in the mall. Do they do that sort of business regularly? Is this not something that might require some sort of sign-off, ring some alarm bells?

It says that she stole >$500K over 3 days. She was able to buy a car and vacation, so there was some time between the fraud and getting caught.

Sue the plastic surgeon for $4 million in damages, plus pain and suffering. They have insurance, they are liable, and you have an estimate how much it will cost to fix it.

If they take money, then you need to keep the money out of reach (another account). Further, you have no business being on their mobile plan; get your own.

When you get your first job you should get your own bank account. For many people, this when they are a teenager.

It’s sensible to keep an account shared with your parents in addition for a few years after high school as it’s a convenient way for parents to transfer money to their children in college or living away from home for the first time.

In your case, you should already have your own bank account and use that primarily. If you want a shared savings account that you can move money into to gift to your parents, where they can transfer money into their own accounts, that’s fine. However, you should not be giving them access to your personal bank accounts. Doing so grants them control of all your money, and you could see them drain the account for a reason they think is good, but you would not concur. You need to have the extra step in place where you move money from your personal account (only accessible by you), to the joint account.

I’d also say that you want to be very careful with your generosity. Your parents are in a uniquely good position to take advantage of your kindness.

You don’t hang anything from them. You need to make an attachment to the beams above the ceiling. Given that there will likely need some bracing, you’re probably squarely in the category of having your landlord to hire someone to do it as it’ll involve opening the ceiling and making some reinforcements for the added load, which will likely need a permit and inspection.

Since the pull of gravity is pretty much constant on Earth’s surface, a measure of mass implies a weight and vice versa.

You are right, mass is measured in kilograms and slugs, and weight in Newtons and pounds. However, people don’t bother with the difference because we something with 454g of mass has 1 pound of weight (while on Earth).

Here's a case where there might be a change in the odds. Usually, after a crash, there's a period of increased vigilance by ground crews to be on the look out for maintenance issues and speeding up checks of various systems. It's almost certainly safer to fly in the weeks following a high-profile crash.

Each time you roll the six-sided die, there's six possible outcomes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. The probability of each one of those is 1/6 (16.66...%), and the total is 1 (100%). It doesn't change with each roll, because you aren't changing the die, or what you are doing. There's nothing connecting one roll to the next; they are completely independent.

Doctors don't typically let cancer progress without treatment. They treat the cancer, based on how far it has progressed and whether it's responded to treatment.

Early on, a cancer is contained in one spot, and it's almost always simpler to cut it out and be done with it. Maybe, follow up with a little chemotherapy (possibly localized to the spot) to be sure.

If swinging a scalpel seems like a bad idea (maybe in a sensitive part of the brain or parts of the neck), then radiation might be a good choice. Radiation is often also used to destroy bone marrow for blood cancers that are addressed with a marrow transplant.

Once cancer spreads, then surgery starts to be less of an option (you can only cut someone up so much, and you'd simply be playing "whac-a-mole" trying to get the tumors), you typically look at chemotherapies that go all over the body. They can be very tough as a treatment, but also effective.

Those are all well established and understood therapies that any hospital that treats cancer patients will be able to provide, and the doctors know how to use all those things to get the best possible outcomes.

Immunotherapies tend to either be very specific, so only usuable in certain situations, or they are personalized and need a facility that has the technology and people to implement them. Many are also novel and still being tested, so they are only available as part of a clinical trial, and a person needs to qualify and the trial needs to still be accepting new patients. Being new, it's also VERY expensive and if many insurance plans only cover it if other treatments haven't worked.

Without getting into excessive detail: today we genotype or sequence DNA from many many people. We can cluster people into groups that have a higher than expected number of shared alleles (genetic variations). This happens when people share common ancestry because at some point their ancestors were isolated to an area, or had moved to a new area and founded a new settlement that grew, establishing a large group with common genetic history. This is effectively what the ancestry DNA companies do. You can plot that information on a map and to show where those people groups are most prevalent.

That same information can be used to make something like a pedigree of people groups, tracing the divergence and convergence of populations in time and geography.

Given that information, you can then ask where in that tree is the allele most common? Can you trace a line between people groups that carry the specific mutation? Sometimes you can, and you can estimate when and where the mutation first occurred. In some cases, you simply can’t — perhaps because the mutation is very common and doesn’t seem to have a strong correlation with any people group.

You are currently accelerating at 1g towards the Earth’s center of mass. The ground obviously prevents your fall, but you feel the acceleration as your weight.

The ‘g’ in 1.5g refers to acceleration of Earth’s gravity at the Earth’s surface, 9.8 m/s/s. Obviously, if the ride moves you it accelerates you, but slightly less obvious is that changing your direction (like swinging you in a circle, instead of allowing you to follow a straight line), also accelerates you. Consider the “Turkish Twist” ride where you stand in a large cylinder that spins. You experience a force that holds you against the wall. If you were on the outside, the spinning would throw you off in a straight line tangent to the cylinder. Inside, however, the wall is restraining you, pushing you onto the circular trajectory, accelerating towards the center of the circle at a rate proportional to the rotational velocity of the cylinder (you are experiencing acceleration even if the cylinder is rotating at a constant velocity). You are accelerating because your velocity (speed and direction of movement) are changing.

Climbing is not prohibited because it’s sacred, but rather a bit over a decade ago they determined that it was being damaged by the constant flood of tourists, so now it’s posted that climbing it is prohibited.

If you want to climb a Mayan pyramid in Yucatán, there are plenty of other sites that permit it.

Whatever you take out of the 401k would count as ordinary income and taxed that way. You are required to take money out of the 401k in the next 7 years anyway, and, assuming that your regular income is pretty steady, you'd minimize your tax impact by taking out 1/7th each year. Is that >$200K + tax (roughly $308K total)? If so, then definitely go the 401k route because you'll need to do it anyway.

If not, then you really just need to calculate the costs in either scenario. The mortgage is likely to be a very reasonable option unless the 401K balance is very high.

Investments and debts both grow. If your debts grow faster than investments, pay them quickly. If investments grow faster than debt, pay the debt slowly.

A computer doesn’t need a GPU.

What a GPU is good at is performing the same task on a bunch of pieces of data at the same time. You want to add 3.4 to a million numbers? The GPU will do it much faster than a CPU can. On the other hand, it can’t do a series of complex things as well as a CPU, or move stuff in and out of the computer’s memory or from storage. You can use the GPU’s special abilities for all sorts of things, but calculations involving 3D objects and geometry is a big one — it’s super useful in computer graphics (why it’s called a Graphics Processing Unit) and games. If you want stunning graphics for games, the GPU is going to be the best at doing that for you.

The CPU talks to a GPU using a piece of software called a “driver”. It uses that to hand data to the GPU, like 3D shapes and textures, and then it sends commands like “turn the view 5 degrees”, “move object 1 left 10 units”, and stuff like that. The GPU performs the necessary calculations and makes the picture available to send to the screen.

It’s also possible to program the GPU to solve math problems that involve doing the same thing to a lot of pieces of data at the same time.

Income is income. The IRS doesn’t really care where it comes from, as long as y they get their share. If you report it as “off-shore sex work” or “donations for digital paintings” or some such, they don’t care. Their job is to collect taxes.

The IRS is looking for evidence that you’ve paid what they think they’re old, or have documentation to justify the discrepancy. They are not an agency equipped to chase down criminals that pay their taxes.

A single sample? No. Multiple samples? It depends. When dosed, the concentration in blood rises for a period and then declines as it is metabolized and cleared from the body. Each drug has a sort characteristic curve for the drug and it’s metabolites that you could compare to a series of samples taken over time which you may be able to use to determine the initial dose. It depends a bit on the dynamics of the drug clearance, and at what times you took the samples.

Stomach acid is mixed with other stuff in the stomach, so it’s not just acid. Then, once it leaves the stomach, it’s mixed with bile, which contains bicarbonate that neutralizes the acid.

More importantly, diarrhea happens when water filters into your intestines, diluting everything and flushing stuff out.

Unfortunately, a lot of people have the same confusion, and it's because politically minded people have fostered it. The science and medicine involved aren't so complicated that a layman couldn't grasp it, but unless you seek out the information or rely on expertise and reliable sources, you'd end up where you find yourself.

Ask yourself: is there an empirical way to determine the efficacy of a vaccine? How do vaccines work / what is the mechanism by which they act? Who has this information / where can I find it? Are there populations that are more clinically at risk from infection? What is the mechanism of that? Why do I not know the answer to these questions? Where would I go to find studies and experts in the field?

All of your questions have been asked and have clinical and scientific answers that an unambiguous and with exquisite detail. It's only political if you ignore the science and listen to the pundits and politicians.

To make a vaccine, the thing that you are making a vaccine against (typically a virus) needs to have a prominent protein on it's surface. The vaccine can be inactive virus, or parts, it doesn't matter, you just need to provide the foreign protein to the immune system so that it can learn to recognize it so when a virus tries to infect, the body is prepared to stop it.

Viruses mutate over time, and if the protein on the outside tends to change a lot, it can be difficult to make a vaccine against. It turns out that small changes in the protein can really change the shape, and it's the shape that the immune system recognizes. The other thing that can make it tricky is that some viruses tend to carry a bubble of fat around them that hides the protein so the immune system can't see it.

HIV is difficult because it has another trick up it's sleeve: it attacks the immune system itself, meaning that if it gets a foothold, a vaccine would be useless because your immune system can't fight back. AIDS, the disease caused by HIV, happens with the immune system pretty much fails because the virus has disabled it. The person starts getting all sorts of infections and cancers that they wouldn't normally get, and that's what makes it deadly.

COVID-19 was simple, for a few reasons: we're already familiar with this type of virus (we've known about coronaviruses for over 60 years, how they work, the genes in them, etc.) and they have whopping big proteins on the surface that don't change a whole lot with time. We also know have molecular biology technology developed in the past few years that makes it possible to rapidly sequence RNA, synthesize RNA, and deliver RNA to cells to express it. So, it took about 3 days to sequence the virus, and a few weeks, to synthesize the RNA message that could teach cells to produce the surface protein of the virus and teach the immune system to recognize it. The whole process could technically be done in a week -- the parts that slow it down are: scaling up production, setting up quality control to make sure it's consistent without contamination, and all the safety testing and process to review safety data, get permission to proceed, etc.

“Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.” - The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Universe, Douglas Adams

The nearest black hole is 960 light years (5.63e15 miles) away. The fastest spacecraft is the Parker Solar Probe at 430,000 mph. At that speed, it would take 1.22 million years to get the probe there. There’s both technical an economic issues in preparing for a 1.22 million year mission.

The title’s a bit misleading. It was known the sequence affected the bendability, here they quantify the impact of DNA methylation on that.

The thing about a technology platform company: once they have got their platform, churning out things on the platform becomes exceptionally efficient, and it's very easy to be prolific. The complication from that is that while you can now be ultra-efficient in the development of drug candidates, doing the actual trials for all of them becomes problematic. Trials are slow and expensive. Thanks to COVID, Moderna can probably float a bunch of trials on their own, but it's still tricky.

Moderna also has a delivery problem. They're being sued by several parties over their use of lipid nanoparticles, and that will continue to be an albatross around their neck until they resolve it or switch.