Quick Picks on ScienceBlogs, July 27

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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