Sideswipe: December 1: Open wide

Open wide.

The Guinness World Record for the largest mouth gape has been awarded to US teen Isaac Johnson. The 17-year-old’s impressive cakehole measures a whopping 10.196cm. With an average human mouth gape ranging between 5 and 6cms, that’s pretty impressive. Much like snakes, humans are also incapable of unhinging their jaws. An individual’s mouth gape is dependent on both the structure of their skull and the soft tissue restrictions around the mouth.

Mother also her uncle

A young girl underwent a DNA test to establish her paternity. The results that came back were so confusing that the science director of the genetic institute in Colombia, Juan Yunis, assumed the sample was contaminated and ordered the test done again. But the results were the same. Some parts of her genome excluded her mother as a parent, while others excluded her assumed father. Further tests found that the child’s mother had XY chromosomes in her blood, which indicate a genetic male. Further research showed that the girl’s assumed father was, in fact, her biological father, but only when the mother’s DNA was excluded. That drew Yunis’ attention to more thoroughly test the mother. The mother had XY chromosomes in her blood and saliva, but her hair and cheek cells had XX chromosomes. Parts of the daughter’s genome matched each kind of her mother’s mismatched DNA. The daughter had inherited some DNA from her mother which originally belonged to her mother’s fraternal twin brother, who was never born. That makes the mother a chimera, the result of an embryo that had absorbed and incorporated cells from a twin who had vanished before anyone knew he had existed.

Hard out grandad

Tough love.

Are there morgues on cruise ships?

They have literally everything else in this floating city, including Covid. An average of 200 people die on cruise ships every year. Where do they put the bodies? As Snopes points out: “Older people spending longer periods of time on cruises means an increased likelihood that some will die of natural causes during their trips.” Snopes quotes from a 2015 article in The Telegraph: “Ocean-going ships are legally required to have both body bags and a morgue (they mostly have space for three or four bodies, but it depends on the size of the ship). The latter must be kept away from the food storage areas. Phew! According to one cruise line, some ports insist bodies are off-loaded as soon as possible – this is done discreetly using an exit away from the passenger gangway. A death certificate is then issued and the body repatriated to its home country […] Other ports allow the body to stay on board and return home, which saves a lot of paperwork. It also means the spouse can continue their holiday. And yes, that does happen.”