Various flora in the Sonoran Desert, taken at Saguaro National Park in Arizona.

Cactus at sunset in Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona.

Prickly pear cactus during sunset at Sagauro National Park in Tucson, Arizona.

Interior of a dead saguaro cactus, or maybe it was a prickly pear cactus—I can’t remember. Taken in Sagauro National Park in Tucson, Arizona.

I am completely fascinated by these foreign flora, the cactus. I’ve never experienced them except as small houseplants or exotic greenhouse plants in Minnesota. This is Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona. The saguaro is the (stereotypical?) cactus with the arms sticking up. It is completely alien to me that these should simply grow out of the ground and even tower high above me. I also find them biologically bizarre.

It’s not very often that you’re asked, “Are you wearing deodorant?” and then handed a wipe to remove it. (Deodorant shows up on the x-rays as calcification.) The mammogram wasn’t for especially urgent matters, just luck of the draw.

I had heard that it was painful if you had small breasts, so I was ready for pain. It was an ordeal, but I’ve experienced much worse. The tech helped shoved me forward into the machine. The procedure involved much shoving and maneuvering my torso forward while a glass plate flattened my boobs in a way I didn’t know was possible—a type of magic trick/medieval torture technique, I believe?

It only really hurt for my right side, but the discomfort was tolerable otherwise.

What is most valuable is the raw data, which is available for download in a non-proprietary format. Through using 3rd-party software with the raw data, I’ve been able to learn more than 23andMe reveals. (The raw data also comes in very handy if you’re not 100% European because 23andMe has a self-acknowledged Eurocentric model.)

For example, how Neanderthal I am from Interpretome: 11 out of 84 identified Neanderthal SNPs. I like the little meter it uses.

Interpretome is a great resource for digging through your raw data since it involves using your browser, instead of downloading and installing something such as R and then running available scripts. Not everyone is comfortable with the latter so the Interpretome interface makes it highly recommended.

Some things I learned from 23andMe:

• I’m 100% European.
• My mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplogroup is H11, from “Central Europe.”
• Compared to average, I have nearly twice the risk for Alzheimer’s disease and about 1.5x the risk for Coronary Heart Disease, lung cancer, Restless Legs Syndrome, and ulcerative colitis.
• I have an “increased risk” of gout and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).
• I’m not a carrier for any of the various things they tested for: Cystic Fibrosis, Tay-Sach’s, Connexin 26-related sensorineural hearing loss, etc.
• I am norovirus-resistant.
• My blood type is likely B (it’s B positive).
• My eyes are likely brown (they’re green).
• I’m not resistant to HIV/AIDS.

Some things I learned from the raw data + third parties:

• I have 19 “European alleles” and 1 “East Asian allele,” whatever that means. (Interpretome)
• At maximum: my ancestry is 93% Northwestern European, 7% Southeastern European, 0% Ashkenazi Jewish. (Euro-DNA-Calc)
• I have 11 out of 84 identified Neanderthal SNPs (as seen above from Interpretome)
• From Doug McDonald’s BGA Project (search the 23andMe forums for his email address):
  

  Most likely fit is 43.0% (+-  6.4%) Europe (various subcontinents) and 57.0% (+-  6.4%) Europe (all Northeast Europe), which is 100% total Europe. The following are possible population sets and their fractions, most likely at the top.

  Italian= 0.386 Lithuani= 0.614
  Spain= 0.381 Lithuani= 0.619
  French= 0.538 Lithuani= 0.462
  French= 0.416 Belorus= 0.584

  For some reason the above and the spot on the map, which both look like Germany, seem to contradict the scatter plot, which looks quite like plain England. So I would say that it could be anywhere from England to Germany.

• I have 21 out of 32 Coronary Artery Disease risk alleles. (Interpretome)
• I have 19 out of 36 Type 2 Diabetes risk alleles. (Interpretome)
• My combined risk of narcolepsy and Restless Leg Syndrome is 3.63x the average. (Interpretome)
• I have a ton of alleles associated with an elevated risk for mental health issues (such as depression, bi-polar disorder, and schizophrenia), and being less likely than average to respond to certain antidepressant medications. (Promethease)

A couple other things you can do with your 23andMe raw data involve submitting it to CureTogether or GEDmatch, and cross-referencing your SNP data using the FireFox extension SNPTips. If all four of your grandparents are from the same background, you can use DIYDodecad. (Mine aren’t, so I didn’t use it.)

By the way: my advice is not to pay full price for a kit, but to wait for it to go on sale because this seems to happen pretty frequently. The wait isn’t long for them to process your sample (of your spit inside a tube), it was only three weeks for me. “6-8 weeks” is the maximum time frame given.

A total of three centipedes have drowned themselves in my cats’ water dish. This did not appear to affect the quality of water as far as the cats were concerned. It may have added flavor and vitamins. Once, there were two centipedes in the water dish. It was likely the aftermath of one centipede forgetting it couldn’t swim as it dove to save another centipede from drowning.

I encountered a centipede in the kitchen sink that was so large, I stood there for a moment to ponder how I was going to kill it. The centipede looked positively tropical in size. The body was almost as long as my pinkie and nearly half as wide. I can’t squash it; the guts will fly everywhere and then I’ll need to do extensive crime-scene clean-up. I didn’t want to touch it, so I decided to scald it to death.

I don’t even want to get into the centipede that touched my bare thigh while I was lying on my bed or the centipede that scurried over my bare foot. I am usually not squeamish, but there’s something about the centipede. I can’t pinpoint exactly what is so frightening. I think millipedes are pretty cute, so it can’t really be the number of legs on a centipede that are scaring me.