The weather was lousy, but the coffee was excellent. Photo by andrewyang.

I spent most of my final spring break as a graduate student in Portland, Oregon, where I am not sure I saw direct sunlight even once. Who wants to get a tan over spring break, anyway? Regular posting resumes when I’m back in Moscow next week. If you “like” D&T on Facebook, you’ll get an alert about that right in your News Feed (TM). That’s a good thing, right?

• Not sure this’ll be practical in Portland. Solar power systems became both cheaper and more efficient in the last twenty years, and they’re likely to keep doing so.
• Not helping. If you’re HIV positive in Missouri, you can be prosecuted for “recklessly” transmitting HIV when you do things that don’t actually transmit HIV.
• Get out your “jump to conclusions” mats. Antidepressants seem to cause increased weight gain in lab rats—but that doesn’t mean they’ve caused the obesity epidemic.
• Take two mind games and call me in the morning. Even if you tell a patient the truth, prescribing a placebo can be ethically complicated.
• Sperm aren’t that tough to kill. A contraceptive pill for men is probably about five years away. In fact, it’s been about five years away for decades.
• Blood and rhetoric. The first attempts at blood transfusion were greeted with controversy that prefigured our modern debates over stem cells and genetic engineering.
• No blarney. Krystal D’Costa recounts how the Irish first came to the Caribbean as slaves.
• In case you missed it. Jon Wilkins bounces off the “adaptive homophobia” kerfuffle to explain more broadly why plausibility is not enough to test adaptive hypotheses. In related news, I got Phrayngulated.