Paint and piercings apparently retard height as this photo, appropriately taken somewhere behind Kresge College on April Fool’s Day, only too clearly indicates.

“Someday,” he vowed, ignoring the others’ whispers. “Someday I will be as tall as you…”

Levity aside, a recent study by researchers from the Peninsula Medical School, Exeter and the University of Oxford and has found that height is 90 percent genetically determined.

Last year the same researchers identified one gene variant that affects height by 0.2 inches (0.5 cm for the metric-minded). The current study, based on genetic data from over 30,000 people, has identified 20 loci or regions where genetic variations can affect adult height by as much as 2.4 inches (6 cm).

The paper was published online April 6th in Nature Genetics .

Fascinating as this is, it’s bad news for me, since I’ve long cherished the belief that I should’ve been 5′6″. Now I have to accept the fact that height is mostly nature and less nurture, which explains why all the milk I drank as a child didn’t do as much as I’d hoped.