Is Your Earwax Wet or Dry?

[quaoar]

I didn't even know there were two kinds. Go figure.

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060129_ear_wax.html

By Bjorn Carey
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 29 January 2006
05:18 pm ET

Do you have dry, flaky earwax or the gooey, stinky type? The answer is partly in your heritage.

A new study reveals that the gene responsible for the drier type originated in an ancient Northeastern Asian population.

Today, 80 to 95 percent of East Asians have dry earwax, whereas the wet variety is abundant in people of African and European ancestry (97 to 100 percent).

Populations in Southern Asia, the Pacific Islands, Central Asia, Asia Minor, and Native North Americans and Inuit of Asian ancestry, fall in the middle with dry wax frequencies ranging from 30 to 50 percent.

[Straight Shooter]

1. Okay, now, think twice before you stick your tongue in someone's ear.

:P

[Botany]

2. Great Post

expect to be locked or shipped to the lounge by the anti ear wax thread
police.

[JDPriestly]

3. What if you are sometimes one and other times the other?

[Roon]

4. I wear hearing aids

and earwax can build up in no time flat. I once had wax so thick that it popped like a cork when they pried it from my ear.

[CatholicEdHead]

7. I have totally lost my balance from earwax before

I had it flushed with a water pick at the low setting and it sounded like a gunshot hitting glass and I was back to normal in an instant.

[Pachamama]

5. EEWWWWW!!!

:puke:

[RobertSeattle]

6. LBN?

[qanda]

8. Why do you hate earwax?

[CatholicEdHead]

9. This will be moved to the Lounge pretty soon

[quaoar]

11. Well, actually it is

It's in Monday's NY Times and it moved over the wire services tonight.

How much more breaking do you want?

[dweller]

10. now let's just nip this in the bud

Mom ... my brain burns!

dp

[Sal Minella]

12. Those ear candle things work. I don't believe in ghosts or herb tea

or horoscopes or seances or ESP or levitation or ouiji boards and I'm not even too sure about telephones, but I'm telling you, those ear candle things work.

[Peter Frank]

13. Well, I couldn't find a pic of the dry type...