more low doses, climate change, and social characteristics of nerds

Today I learned from a friend who recently returned from a conference on pesticides that black plastic trash bags typically have pesticide and fragrance chemicals added to them during the manufacturing process, and that would be why they reek like they do.

In yet another installment of our unintentional series on low-dose chemical exposures, Gulf War Syndrome comes from a combination of sarin gas, pyridostigmine bromide (PB), and bug repellent. The quote of the day spells out how doctors started putting that together:

To Abou-Donia, the connection between sarin gas and Gulf War syndrome became clear after terrorists hit a Tokyo subway with sarin in 1995. Hospital workers who never were in the subway but who worked with sickened passengers came down with the same symptoms reported by Gulf War vets.

In climate change news, parts of the San Francisco Bay Area didn't get below 90^oF at night for four days last summer. Having grown up around there, I can say with all certainty that that's probably in the East Bay, but that's still way hotter than it used to be. And keep in mind that I still don't care whether or not people are responsible for our current warming; I just care that we stop polluting the place.

And last but not least, a woman with no discernible physics background has been hanging around using computers, going to seminars, and bugging people in the Stanford physics department since 2004 - and she'd have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for that darned other kid who was sleeping in the dorms and likely prompted a physicist to remember to say something to someone who wasn't another physicist.