Generate the answer for a given question. The question requires common knowledge of English. Make sure that the answer is in detail, long, consistent with the context, and requires general knowledge of English. To be less repetitive, please vary your language for each question. Give a proper explanation to answer, and if necessary, provide the definition of various terms. And conclude your answer if it's long. If you have used other resources (e.g., Merriam Webster's.) to answer the question, include citations in your answer. You don't need to paraphrase the context of your resources, but make sure that your answer is consistent and complete.

Consider this quote from Mark Twain: 'Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.' Does it mean having children is a bad thing? Could you explain what the children imply here?.
Two thoughts are run together: Familiarity breeds contempt {knowing people very well lets you see their faults} Familiarity breeds children {physical familiarity between the sexes leads to children} Hence Familiarity breeds contempt and children. A similar example of this particular way of playing with words (called Zeugma) is: 'You are free to execute your laws, and your citizens, as you see fit.'

I overheard my manager asking 'What are you up to?' What does that idiom mean? Is it an informal/negative way of asking??.
'What are you up to?' means 'What have you been doing lately?'. If you add an adverb to the end of the phrase, for instance, 'What are you up to tonight?' or 'What are you up to this summer?' it can be interpreted as 'What are you planning to do tonight?' or 'What are you planning to do this summer?'.

I am writing a report where I want to say something like: The number of structures in the PDB has been steadily increasing, with nearly 140 thousand structures currently available. However, this number feigns in comparison to the number of unique protein sequences that have been discovered, with over 210 million unique sequences present in the UniParc database. However, I am not sure about the 'this number feigns in comparison to' part. I have a feeling that I am using the wrong word here, but googling around didn't give me any leads.

Pales in comparison, I suspect. To pale in comparison is to look weak, small, meagre, or inferior compared to something else. Pale here takes the little-used sense to become smaller. It's the same pale used in the common phrase (less common in the U.S.) pale into insignificance, whose meaning is obvious. (says Grammarist.com)