Bubblin' under

1. Taste and decency
How come it's OK for BBC to show the assassinated Chechen leader's corpse here but not (for different reasons) corpses of coalition troops or civilian casualties from more sensitive wars like here?

2. Botulinum
The potent bacterial neurotoxin botulin, cosmetic relaxant ©Botox and indeed botulinonia all derive from Latin botulinum, for sausage. Not yet sure whether Clostridium botulinum is named for the food it was cultured from or (more likely) a morphonym for this elongated, cylindrical bacillus.



3. Synaesthesia
Interest is sparked by the possibilities for cross-potentiation between cognitive modalities, not a special quality I claim, but one that's humanly commonplace in converting facial expression to emotion, sound to meaning, speech to writing. And more abstractly, extracting emotional reactions to a visual image, a visual image from a poem, a memory from a smell or visual and emotional responses to music.







UK synaesthesia/
Macalester synesthesia

4. Arthropods (again)
After gluten and milk (late, localised food introductions), crustaceans/shellfish are the most frequent causes of allergic food reactions worldwide, and the prevalence of these is highest in areas exposed to such foods (Asia and Scandinavia).

Other principal pathways to immunological responses to arthropods are
a) their stings, widespread and adaptive in diverse phylum
b) dust mite scurf in exacerbating asthma and atopy.

Allergic, histaminic and anaphylactic responses are (mal)adaptive reactions (nature doesn't care which) of embedded immunological mechanisms, which evolved to combat infection and infestation by a profusion of willing viral, bacterial, fungal, helminthic (worm) and arthropod (fly, flea, tick, louse) parasites. Molluscs and arthropods as well as their parasites (think of yellow fever or malaria, transmitted via the vector of a fly) have had a long time for their attack and hosts' countering defense mechanisms to develop.