Licensed geek talking

The first disease that I can think of which links kidney problems with blindness is diabetes mellitus, but kidney isn't the cause of the problem. I can't think of anything else based on my knowledge of what the kidneys do (waste removal, promote production of red blood cells) (which I always found strange because to me it makes more sense if the liver's in charge of the promoting)(come to think of it, if certain wastes build up in the body that COULD cause blindness, but I'm not sure if this will occur before the other toxins have reached critical levels) so I've looked it up (courtesy of Google Scholar, which is handy) and there's an article (2005) about how there is a disease called Senior-Loken Syndrome where the patient'd get kidney disease (nephronophthisis - don't ask me how to pronounce this, I have no idea) and a form of blindness (retinitis pigmentosa). But then, this has been traced to a defective gene, and so kidney is, once again, not the cause of the disease.
So I'm sorry, Kate, but I honestly don't know.

Also, honestly, I find the fact that I've bookmarked pages like "Molecules to Go" and "123 Genomics" far more worrisome than whether or not my spelling is better when I'm talking - er, writing - science-speak.

While I am taking full advantage of my geek license however (and thank you, Lucy), I'd like to link you guys to something pretty. This, ladies and gents, is what I spend about six hours per week looking at:

Lab 3 photos - from last week. Medicago is alfalfa, and the stem's stained with t-blue, which is toxic. Come to think of it, all our dyes are either corrosive or toxic, but we're required to use neither gloves nor safety glasses. I guess at this point they just assume that we're neat-fingered...with, I suppose, good reason. After all, parts of those six hours require us to do cross sections and longitudinal sections of plant materials that are usually 1 cm long, with razors that can get "dull" just by touching it to a hard surface, such as a table. You either get to be neat-fingered or you get stitches on your fingers (which has happened to a student before, I heard), so that's ...really not much of a choice.

Lab 5 photos - stuff from this week. You HAVE TO scroll down and see the Tillandsia scale. It's the blue and purple thing that looks like a weird tropical sea creature. Tillandsia is the Spanish Moss, and the scales are what make the plant look whitish. The scales help the moss absorb water. The so-called scales are actually a type of trichome. (And Spanish Moss is pretty neat plant-wise too and no, it's not an actual moss. Kate wanted to keep some last time I dragged her to the conservatory, so we took a bit home but alas, our apartment is too cold and dry for the tropical plant.)

Oh God it's Friday.