Bob Holmes in Knowable Magazine:
After a train carrying chemicals derailed and caught fire in East Palestine, Ohio, in 2023, residents were exposed to carcinogens such as vinyl chloride, acrolein and dioxin. Since tumors are typically slow to develop, it could take decades to know what that did to the locals’ cancer risk, but there may be a quicker route to an answer: The residents’ dogs were also exposed, and dogs develop cancer more quickly.
Studying dogs and their cancers turns out to be an excellent way to learn more about cancer in people. And it’s not just that dogs and owners share exposures to many of the same environmental carcinogens. Researchers are also learning that cancers develop along remarkably similar pathways in the two species.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Vast swathes of the human genome remain a mystery to science. A new AI from Google DeepMind is helping researchers understand how these stretches of DNA impact the activity of other genes. While the 
On June 5, 1975, on the seedy stage of CBGB on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a band named Talking Heads took the stage for the first time. Unlike the Ramones, for whom they were opening, they weren’t sporting black leather jackets or edgy haircuts. David Byrne and Chris Frantz had met at art school a few years before, and the bassist, Tina Weymouth, had only learned to play her instrument six months prior. But within a few weeks, Talking Heads would be plastered on the cover of The Village Voice, well on their way to utterly transforming the downtown New York music scene. After Jerry Harrison joined Talking Heads in 1977, the band would go on to radically alter rock music’s relationship to avant-garde art and performance. In his new book, Burning Down the House, Jonathan Gould tells the story of how Talking Heads experimented their way to a singular musical style over the course of eight studio albums and one incredible concert film, Stop Making Sense, and he discusses their enduring influence despite having disbanded more than 30 years ago.
Dissenting — again — on the last day of the Supreme Court’s term, in its most high-profile case, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not mince words. She had for months plainly criticized the opinions of her conservative colleagues, trading the staid legalese typical of justices’ decisions for impassioned arguments against what she has described as their acquiescence to President Donald Trump. She returned to that theme again in the final case, ripping the court for limiting nationwide injunctions.
I was intrigued to read about a 
Employers are drowning in AI-generated job applications, with LinkedIn now processing 11,000 submissions per minute—a 45 percent surge from last year, according to new data 
A few months ago, on the New York subway, I looked up at the woman sitting opposite me, and found my eyes drawn to her cap: “I don’t give a F**K,” read big white letters stitched into navy blue cotton.
A deep brain device that allowed a man with no limbs to play computer games is one of an increasing number of 
Moments before I hop into my first Waymo in Austin, Texas, the driverless car is already locked in a standoff with a human rival. I’ve hailed the car in a tricky triangular parking lot in the middle of a big intersection, hoping to hitch a ride downtown. After about six minutes of waiting, I see it approaching: a hulking white all-electric Jaguar SUV with whirring sensors on all sides, conjuring a rhinoceros with hummingbird wings. But when the Waymo enters the lot, it takes far too wide of a turn, and finds itself nose-to-nose with a pickup truck driver trying to exit. The driver glares at the Waymo, but sees nobody through the front windshield. For a second, man and machine face off in a very mundane version of The Terminator.