The new month sees Dave Munger launching his new project, The Daily Monthly, which will feature daily posts on a new topic each month. The effect is like a long-form magazine article released in serial form. The inaugural topic, AIDS in America, is already really interesting. Meanwhile, ocean blogger Miriam Goldstein has closed shop at the Oyster’s Garter to join Deep Sea News. In actual science news:

Photo by auntie rain.

• No surprise here: fragmented forest makes poor panda habitat. (The Voltage Gate)
• Close observation of decaying fish (ugh!) shows that the traits most useful for reconstructing evolutionary relationships might be the ones least likely to fossilize. (dechonrization)
• Protecting ecosystems may not always mean not manipulating them. (The EEB & flow)
• Alligators pump air through their lungs in a one-way flow – just like birds. (The Reptipage)
• How do you figure out how ants navigate? Put them on teeny-tiny stilts. (The Thoughtful Animal)
• British medical journal The Lancet finally gets around to retracting a flawed, twelve-year-old study that suggested a link between vaccination and autism. (The retraction statement is free online, with registration. News coverage is ubiquitous, but Michael Specter is in the running for most coldly furious about the whole debacle.)
• Freshwater eels appear to have evolved from ancestors that lived in the deep sea. (Deep Sea News)