Are there any Western records of mice that act like this?

http://englishrussia.com/2013/08/19/strange-creature-no-the-mouse-line/

This may or may not relate to dark matter, but the other day, an electrical storm was passing over my house, and I momentarily saw a dark spot on the wall. Is there a scientific explanation for such phenomena? I've never had visual disturbances like that otherwise.

Nobody hires thousands of engineers. A typical employer will hire at most a handful of engineers, if they are needed at all.

I am a statistician for a major hospital chain. I do important work and I am a celebrity within the organization, but there has been no need for more statisticians. There is only so much work that requires formal analysis.

Yes, I've followed the boom of "bioinformatics" majors and their spectacular inability to get jobs. I've been to academic conferences that talked big about the promise of genomics, never mind all the unemployed PhDs scurrying around looking for jobs. I have read academic journals that talked big about the job prospects of such students, quoting an exceptional graduate that managed to get an assistant professorship somewhere. When I asked the writer about other graduates, they acknowledged that they had only interviewed that one student, and have no idea about how other graduates did. Why yes, "genomic medicine" has produced its laughable failures such as Bi-dil, along with other new age "biotech" companies that make up whatever random DNA and sell the "genome data" to customers, telling them that they are at risk for whatever random diseases. If you test a sugar pill on enough "ethnic groups", it will appear successful in at least one of them. And so it goes for billions of random DNA letters -- one can use the data to prove anything they like. Accordingly, real academics do not take genetics seriously.

Fire ants do interbreed.

http://www.caes.uga.edu/commodities/fieldcrops/forages/events/FC13/03/ANR-1248%20Fire%20ants%20and%20cattle.pdf
http://www.al.com/sports/index.ssf/2012/07/fire_ants_joes_outdoor_office.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=vxt5BqOKEAIC&pg=PA510&lpg=PA510&dq=fire+ants+interbreed&source=bl&ots=8eWZaSkLp_&sig=uJHTanPl1LV7mhieoReC1eX0plc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dwiYUdimJ-rI0gHttIGwBQ&ved=0CEwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=fire%20ants%20interbreed&f=false

Also, they do bite before stinging.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_ants

Different plant "species", such as of pine, do interbreed as well. The distinction of species vs. sub-species is often blurred in the wild.

I did not see such a chemical at the local hardware stores. I did learn the futility of any agent, since they bred faster than any chemical could kill them. They seemed to have a deep underground reservoir of breeders.

They naturally developed a population cycle. The lawn would be a sea of ants one year, then be relatively sparse the next year due to starvation or whatever diseases they had.

We just sold a home in Remlap, Alabama. The entire mountain that the house was on was owned by fire ants -- they built underground interconnected cities, so there was no point in spraying a mound. They were aggressive and bit you without provocation. When I got bit, my blood pressure dropped and I felt very ill for a few hours. The fire ants interbreed with local species, so they came in a large variety of appearances. The ones we had were very small and dark crimson, almost black. Their bite was all out of proportion to their size, though. We think they may have interbred with crazy ants because they liked to walk crazy zigzag paths.

When I went to grad school to get my PhD in biostatistics, they taught us in genetic epidemiology class that 1st cousin marriages do not have a significantly higher risk of genetic problems in offspring than marriages by unrelated people.

Some parts of the world where 1st cousin marriages have taken place for many generations do have higher concentrations of some forms of thalassemia. But for a typical American who does not come from such a lineage, the medical risks of first cousin marriages are minimal.

I went to computer science grad school in the 90s. People, including professors, often wrote English at a grade-school level. I am now an assistant editor for scientific journals. I see papers every month that are so poorly written that I don't even know what they are trying to say. I critique accordingly, though we are not allowed to be too direct because it might hurt the feelings of non-native speakers of English.

Other than single-gene diseases, we have a very poor idea of which QTLs influence which traits (assuming QTLs even exist). With billions of possibilities among all the alleles and haplotypes, one can make up whatever combination of DNA letters they want and "prove" its association with a given phenotype through a low p-value. One can also use "penetrance" to explain away deviations. One can build whatever Bayesian models they want, building a house of cards that will collapse very quickly as new data is introduced which contradicts the old. I was going to do my dissertation on statistical genetics, but the more I learned about it, the more I learned how intractable the problem is. I did my dissertation on a different topic.

I've known plenty of engineers who couldn't get jobs even when the economy was "good". I was once a chemical engineering major, but after going to many job fairs, concluded that it is a worthless degree -- nobody wanted them. I've since met chemical engineers who became computer programmers, since they didn't want to work at e.g. a pulp factory in Mississippi or an oil refinery in Nigeria.

On the other hand, how useful are science or engineering degrees? I know plenty of science and engineering graduates that spent a year or more after graduation to find a job. For any given specialty, there are only a handful of employers that care, and openings only occur once every several years.

I have two family members in the journalism business. The media business has a cycle of covering particular topics and moving on when the public gets bored of it. Plenty of news does not get coverage at all, at least by English language media, if the country is too remote or the topic is too cliche.