Quick Picks on ScienceBlogs, July 27

  • "Compared To Your Pet Iguana, You Are Practically Blind"

    How poorly do mammals see? More poorly than we ever could have imagined before discovering melanopsin. Visial photoreception is only the tip of the iceberg.

  • Speaking of complexity: "A Simple Story Gets Complicated"

    Promiscuity in some individuals (we're talking about voles, here) is not as elegantly accounted for by genetics as we once thought.

  • "Somewhat Less Gleeful Gleevec"

    Gleevec, a drug for chronic myelogenous leukemia, hit the market in 2001, and was welcomed as the harbinger of a new generation of cancer treatments. Now it's been shown that the drug sometimes causes heart damage -- though it's still regarded as a breakthrough product.

  • "Drugs and Heat"

    Several medications that raise your risk of heatstroke and other summer-specific ill effects.

  • "Popcorn Workers' Lung"

    A serious pulmonary condition affects workers who toil in factories that make microwave popcorn, and the artificial butter flavor that adorns it.

  • "RoundUp Ready Round-Up is Ready: (a) Atrazine and (b) Big Organic"

    Ben Cohen directs you to a select crop of recent scientific papers and MSM pieces on the environment + science + technology. Hermaphroditic frogs, Michael Pollan on the business of organic farming, anad more.

  • "Stop the Presses!"

    This just in: Ed Brayton of Dispatches From the Culture Wars finds something on World "Nut" Daily that he can actually agree with.

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Due to work stuff, I'm very busy this week, and I don't have time to write a detailed pathological language post, so I chose something that doesn't take a lot of explanation, but
While browser over at programming.reddit.com, I came across something simultaneously hideous and amazing.
I saw it at Julie's.
"American Music," the Violent Femmes "California Stars," Billy Bragg and Wilco "The City of New Orleans," Arlo Guthrie "Song to Woody," Bob Dylan "The Body of an American," the Pogues