I wrote about the potential impact of some September callups for Insider, and held a Klawchat on Friday. I’m back on Baseball Tonight in the small hours this evening, with the show airing at 2:30 am Eastern.

This week’s links, from food science to gender bias in sports fanbases:

• The secrets of fake flavors. “Natural” flavors aren’t always what you think they are.
• How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty. A very long read that’s worth every word. It’s the new racism, which seems a lot like the old racism’s poll taxes and voter tests.
• Bud and Miller Are Trying to Hijack Craft Beer—and It’s Totally Backfiring. Reminds me of the day I learned Blue Moon was just Coors with different labeling. Screw that.
• Dr. James Andrews wants your young athlete to stay healthy by playing less. Story is over a year old, but more people are willing to hear the message due to the rash of elbow surgeries.
• Female hockey fandom and the good ol’ boys’ club. I guess it’s bias week here on the dish. I don’t think any male sport’s fan base or media contingent is particularly friendly to women.

Also, for fellow fans of melodic death metal, the upcoming In Flames album, Siren Charms, is available as a $5 pre-order through that link. I’m not that familiar with their work, but if anyone’s heard the new album, I’d love to hear your opinions.

It’s been a light week for me at ESPN, by design, but I did write one follow-up draft post about which teams drafted their new #1 prospects, and conducted a Klawchat on Thursday. If you missed my draft recaps, you can find my AL and NL posts from last week.

I’ll be at Lakewood tonight for their game against Hickory, and at the Carolina-California Leagues’ All-star Game here in Wilmington on Tuesday, the 17th.

If you live in the area, I’m going to be a “guest bartender” at a charity event at Ulysses Gastropub in north Wilmington, at the intersection of Marsh Road and Silverside, on June 26th. More details to follow as I get them.

And now the links…

• Learning a second language can slow brain aging. Das ist sehr gut, ja?
• Dow Chemical is pushing to expand use of a 2,4-D, a potentially harmful herbicide. They want to sell crops genetically modified to resist 2,4-D, then have farmers use more of the herbicide to kill weeds – but this approach just creates stronger weeds and the development of even more dangerous chemicals to fight them.
• Doctors used a DNA test to identify an illness, the first time this method had been used successfully to treat a patient with an unknown pathogen.
• The FDA is at it again, overregulating the American cheese-making industry.
• Score one for consumers, though: SCOTUS ruled that POM can pursue its lawsuit against Coca-Cola. POM alleges that Coca-Cola misled consumers by labelled a drink as “blueberry-pomegranate juice” even though those two ingredients constitute just 0.5% of the total product.

My content from ESPN.com this week:

* My second attempt to project this year’s first round. I’ll do another one on Tuesday, and a final one the morning of the draft.
* An updated ranking of the top 25 prospects in the minors.
* This week’s Klawchat.

And this week’s links:

• PETA is trying to scam people into thinking there’s a link between dairy consumption and autism. Actual science tip: There isn’t.
• Some actual good news in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And we need some good news there, because the alternative is seriously scary shit.
• I know it went viral a bit yesterday, but if you haven’t seen this story about a five-year-old transgendered boy, it’s well worth the seven minutes. That child is lucky to have parents who realized nothing else mattered but taking care of his needs – and that this wasn’t something they could or should try to change.
• Why is giving kids healthy school lunch options a political issue? I know the answer, by the way (it starts with the letter $). But it’s still disgusting.
• Also from NPR, why bacon smells so good, explained via chemistry. That’s important research right there, people.

Finally, the highlight response from my Twitter arguments with a couple of creationists, most of whom trotted out the same tired and very wrong arguments against evolution, was this doozy (and please don’t go on Twitter and harass the poster):

@keithlaw nope. Also worth noting that I don't believe in carbon dating because Bible says atmosphere functioned differently before Flood.

— Andy Black (@IrvingAg13) May 28, 2014

Carbon dating is just another godless conspiracy, I guess.

My first mock draft for 2014 – that is, my projection of how the 27 picks of the first round will go – went up on Thursday, and I held my regular Klawchat that day as well. The next mock will go up after next week’s college conference tournaments; I’ll be at the SEC tournament in Hoover from Wednesday to Friday, if any of you choose to make that trip.

A friend of mine in the baseball world recommended the KettlePizza, a kit that sits on top of a kettle-style charcoal grill to turn it into a wood-burning pizza oven. He swears by it, saying he can get the internal temperature up to 800 degrees, which is enough for traditional Neapolitan-style pizza (my favorite kind). Have any of you given tried one of these? I’ve mentioned it to my wife in the context of my upcoming birthday … so any comments would be great.

And now, the weekly links…

• Did Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” rip off another song? If so, it wouldn’t be the first such accusation to succeed against the band.
• Melting of Antarctic Ice Sheet Might Be Unstoppable. Okay, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
• A new contender for “biggest dinosaur ever” has been discovered in Argentina. This would be my daughter’s pick for best link of the week.
• Incredible close-up footage of the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption. I’ve always been fascinated by that eruption for two reasons: It’s one of my earliest memories of a major news event, and volcanoes are awesome.
• Jackfruit: A fruit to feed the world? I first saw one of these monsters in Hawai’i, and I imagine you could feed a family of twelve on one of these.

Sorry this is a day late – I daytripped Indiana at Penn State yesterday, which was almost 11 hours door-to-stadium-to-door. IU’s Sam Travis is a better player than I’d realized; this was my first look and he reminded me of some very good big leaguers.

My ESPN content from the past week:

* My ranking of the top 100 draft prospects for 2014. Of course, we’ve had more injury news since then, so Fedde and Finnegan would move down.
* This week’s Klawchat.

My first projection of this year’s first round will go up on Thursday, May 15th. I’ll chat that afternoon, and I’ll be on Baseball Tonight on Wednesday and Thursday this week.

I didn’t have time to do a five-of-something segment, but I’ll make it up to you with eight links, culled from five different sources:

• Chemist Turns Software Developer After Son’s Diagnosis. When his infant son lost an eye to cancer due to late detection, this scientist decided to find a better way to catch the disease.
• A wonderful longform piece from New York on how a bad Benghazi scoop may have spelled the end of Lara Logan’s career.
• I met George Will once, and found him both personable and intelligent. I didn’t love the hagiography aspects of Men at Work, but that’s nothing compared to his outright denialism of science – not just climate change, but the whole shebang. He has gone full crackpot.
• Speaking of climate change: Less Nutritious Grains May Be in Our Future, also from NPR. Since grains are probably a key element in feeding a growing global population, this is especially bad news.
• Time is short to address antibiotic resistance. Unless you’re cool with the days when a prick from a rosebush meant a hospital stay and possibly death, that is.
• High-tech push has board games rolling again, from the New York Times. Most interesting: The rising role of crowdfunding in game development, which makes sense given how many good games are still fundamentally niche products.
• Taking notes by hand beats taking them on a laptop. You might write a lot less, but you’ll retain more.
• ESPN’s Top Draft Analysts Workshop Your Short Story. It was an honor just to lead this roundtable.