Wood thrush, or mercury-poisoning canary? Photo by dermoidhome.

• New at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Making sense of humans’ role in the extinction of North America’s big ice age mammals and the evolution of multicellularity.
• Splenda suddenly doesn’t seem so bad. The ancient Romans created the world’s first artificial sweetener. It was a lead compound. And we can still see the resulting poisoning in Roman skeletal remains.
• Not a feeding frenzy; more like a bridge club. Observational evidence suggests that sharks have social lives.
• Silvery spring. Increasing—and worrying—levels of mercury have been detected in common songbirds in the northeastern U.S.
• Sleep on it. Separating good ideas from bad ones requires taking time to not think about them.
• Black, apparently. Reconstructing the color of Archaeopteryx feathers.
• However, the Moon must still hit your eye like a big pizza pie for amore as we know it. Life as we know it probably doesn’t require the Moon as we know it.
• In your pants. Are modern grooming habits creating an extinction crisis?
• Infant mortality, mental illness, and drug use. Just some of the bad things that increase along with greater income inequality.
• Calibrated unfocusedness. Jumping spiders judge distances using blurry vision.

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