Science online, butterflies lost, found, and drawn edition

2008.11.28 - Heliconius melpomene Wallace didn’t collect this one. Photo by jby.
  • This week, at The Molecular Ecologist: In some viruses, mutation rates may be shaped by simple population dynamics.
  • And, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Do African herbivores run for their dinner, or for their lives?
  • Bookmarked! A step-by-step guide for getting started with Github.
  • What is this, 1920? No, we humans haven’t freed ourselves from natural selection.
  • Because where else would it want them? Here is an insect with gears in its legs.
  • Good news: they’re nothing new. Bad news: they’re nothing new. A brief history of human fretting about pimples.
  • Found by a seventeen-year-old, too. Some butterflies collected by Alfred Russell Wallace, then apparently lost in a fire, have turned up in Oxford.
  • Yep, they have it. The latest approach for reconstructing past environmental condition involves whales’ earwax.
  • And how they link to animals’ physiology. A nice description of plant immune responses.
  • Eyeing the exits is never a good sign for the thing you’re exiting. No, PhDs looking at non-academic careers is not a sign that we should make more PhDs.
  • Vladimir Nabokov: He could write, he could catch butterflies, he could handle a colored pencil a little.
  • “She was a professor?” Yeah, but she was an adjunct.