Science online, tastefully uphostered placeboes edition

No in-flight drinks on this trip. Photo by pheanix.
  • Take note, Book of Leviticus. Menstruating women are not poisonous.
  • Oops? As many as half of all neuroscience papers may make a basic statistical error.
  • Talk about commitment. Migrating birds supply themselves with water by breaking down their own muscles.
  • Well, why not? The placebo effect may be as much about waiting room décor as it is about a well-designed sugar pill.
  • First, remove the stack of unread manuscripts from thine own inbox. Is peer review broken, or are we all just lousy peers?
  • Billions. The costs of introduced insects, estimated.
  • Not a monster-themed alternative history, either. Abraham Lincoln, forensic meteorologist.
  • Hundreds of billions. The economic return on investment of ones of billions in NIH research funding, estimated.
  • Wait. Rats’ ears can ring? A possible cure for ringing ears, demonstrated in rats.
  • Prince, biologist, geologist, anarchist, fan of Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Eric Michael Johnson interviews the author of a new biography of Peter Kropotkin.
  • Might be pretty humid, though. Astronomers identify an exoplanet about the right distance from its primary to support life as we know it.
  • Brains aren’t as hard to come by as we thought. A new phylogeny of the molluscs supports four independent origins of complex brains.

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