Ottawa skyline. Photo by dugspr.

Short list this week, what with my preparations for the Evolution meetings in Ottawa. (In fact, I’m there right now!) I’ll be writing about the meetings with the crew over at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, so check there for updates. In other science-y news:

• Excuse me, I have some textbook illustrations to throw out. Like, all of them. A new, 150-million-year-old fossil suggests that most dinosaurs had feathers.
• It’s either God or the missing link. Headlines differ. Physicists announced this week that the Large Hadron Collidor has found evidence of a new particle that could be the Higgs Boson. See also: a good Q&A here, and a great (original) visual analogy here.
• Can’t make trees into coal if the fungi get there first. When fungi evolved the capacity to digest woody tissue, coal formation slowed way down.
• Although causation could go either way. The cat-associated parasite Toxoplasma gondii is associated with greater suicide risk in infected humans.

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