SCIENCE: Ogling beautiful women a natural reflex for men.

MAYBE SCIENTISTS AREN’T THE PLACE TO GO FOR DATING ADVICE? How Far Should You Go on a First Date? Scientists Can’t Decide.

THE QUESTION: Challenge–A car for all jobs? Or a car for each job?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Drinking Saved Our Marriage.

THOUGHTS ON what hyperinflation will look like. “Civil society will not collapse along with the dollar. Civil society will stumble about like a drunken sailor, but eventually right itself and carry on with a new normal.”

AT AMAZON, it’s the Friday Sale.

MILITARY VOTES? WHO CARES? Outrage: Pentagon Grants Five States Waivers from MOVE Act.

WHO THE PRESS IS ROOTING FOR: Obama, Democrats got 88 percent of 2008 contributions by TV network execs, writers, reporters.

NRA WILL NOT BE ENDORSING HARRY REID this year. This is actually kind of news — Reid’s been pretty good on gun stuff by Dem standards, and lots of people expected NRA to back him. In fact, this represents a change. In normal elections, the back-incumbents-who-have-been-pretty-good-regardless-of-party approach makes sense. But this isn’t a normal election, and I think the NRA has figured this out.

WINNING the Whiskey Olympics.

REASON TV: Filling Up Prisons Without Fighting Crime: Mark Kleiman on America’s Criminal Justice System. I think we’re imprisoning too many people and, often, the wrong people. Violent crime should be treated more harshly, everything else less so.

SIT LONGER, DIE SOONER. Like I said before, you can always get a treadmill desk.

GALLERY: 30 Awesome College Labs.

TRANSONIC COMBUSTION: Can supercritical fluids give a 30% mpg boost?

THINK OF IT AS A CREEPY-CRAWLY STIMULUS: Bed Bug Crisis Spawns Booming New Industry.

WELL, GOOD: New Cancer Drug Gets Dramatic Results. “An experimental drug designed to block the effects of a genetic mutation often found in patients with malignant melanoma, a deadly cancer with few existing treatments, significantly shrank tumors in about 80 percent of those who carried the mutation. The findings, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, signal a major success for so-called targeted cancer therapies, which are designed to block the effects of genetic mutations that drive the growth of cancer cells.” Faster, please. Hope the FDA won’t, you know, ban it because it might cost money or something.

SO THE OLD LINE WAS THAT TEA PARTY CANDIDATES WOULD BE SPOILERS, but it’s angry, bitter G.O.P. insiders who are playing that role now. Just more evidence that the Republican party’s establishment cares more for its own than for policy — or the country.

JENNIFER RUBIN: The “summer of recovery” is going to be the “Mission Accomplished” banner of this administration.

JALOPNIK: Screw Burning Man: This year’s greatest desert festival is a three-day Mad Max reenactment!

I WOULDN’T BRING UP PARIS ROME IF I WERE YOU, IT’S POOR SALESMANSHIP. “Bringing up the Sack of Rome in the context of the attack on the World Trade Center is not a reassuring argument.”

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Japan, Germany, S. Korea commercialize nanotech better than U.S.

IN THE MAIL: Bolos: Their Finest Hour. Famous science fiction writers do stories on a theme by Keith Laumer.

LAWYERING AGAINST TYRANNY: If you missed it yesterday, check out my InstaVision interview with Scott Bullock of the Institute For Justice.

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: Roger Ebert, Hypocrisy, and “the Big Lie.”

A TOUGH TIME to be young and unemployed. “One indication of the weakness of the job market is that research institutions are getting too many intern applications — from college graduates who should be getting paid jobs.”