Science online, “healthy as radium” edition

Wristwatches have a surprisingly deadly history. Photo by wjhall31.
  • In which a new technology loses its shine. World War I helped create a fashion for wristwatches with radioactive glow-in-the-dark faces—a fashion that turned deadly.
  • Not gay, just confused. Really. Male mice with low serotonin are sexually interested in both males and females, but this is could be because lack of serotonin makes them less sensitive to smell.
  • Wow. A 1987 outbreak of radiation poisoning in central Brazil didn’t actually start with an egg sandwich, but the sandwich is when folks started to notice.
  • Just as nuclear power is starting to look extra scary. A new “artificial leaf” uses sunlight to efficiently generate hydrogen from water.
  • Useless and potentially harmful. Not only does human chorionic gonadotropin not help with weight loss as popularly thought, it can also transmit mad-cow disease.
  • Perfect for reading while in queue. Why do airline passengers jostle for quicker access to reserved seats? Maybe because waiting is territorial.
  • No one is an island, but we might all be lakes. Advances in understanding the immense diversity of microbes every human being carries around may make medicine more like ecology.

After a long stretch of linkfests bereft of moving pictures, here’s video of a wasp deliberately removing ants from its food. Via Ed Yong, who provides more explanation based on the journal article from which this comes.