This one is for PZ. Photo by Joachim S. Müller.

I spent my week readying another (!) manuscript for submission and doing large volumes of PCR. And, yes, surfing the web between thermal cycler loads. But! I read about science, so that’s mostly OK.

• What we have here is a failure to communicate. With their complex nervous systems and surprising intelligence, octopuses ought to be as sensitive to pain as mammals—but there’s surprisingly little evidence to address that question. (NeuroDojo)
• Where are all the men? Analysis of DNA from thousand-year-old “moa graveyards” in New Zealand finds female skeletons overwhelmingly outnumbering males. (Laelaps via @nerdychristie)
• You can only preserve what you can get. Land protection efforts by NGOs fall short of established habitat protection goals, a case study in Maine finds. (Conservation Maven)
• How long we have left is in-DEET-terminate. Laboratory selection experiments demonstrate that mosquitoes may be evolving resistance to the insect über-repellent. (Wired Science)
• It only took 41 years longer than we needed to put a man on the moon. A Florida horticulture professor has bred what could be the first good-tasting mass-producible tomato. (The Washington Post)
• We’re all Neanderthals now. Analysis of the first complete Neanderthal genome suggests that they interbred with modern humans. (Special feature in Science, NPR, John Hawks Weblog)

And for those of you who didn’t recognize the three-letter acronym in my introductory paragraph, this is what PCR does: