Photo by Pierre-Yves Babelon.

• Okay, now this is bad. Humans’ supply of chocolate is in trouble because of bug-tending ants.
• A history of modern lawns, and the alternatives.
• And with a funding cut. House Republicans unilaterally decide that NASA should ditch its asteroid-capture plans in favor of a moon base.
• Because mutation happens during mitosis, too. When it comes to genotypes, we each contain multitudes.
• Not good! The feedback between climate change and wildfires.
• It’s about deciding. And also not deciding. On starting up a lab.
• Good news. The next weapon against one group of drug-resistant bacteria might be a fungicide.

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Lose the best pollinator, and the others are less effective. Photo by jby.

• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! The search for the missing human boner bone. And Yoder v. Brinkman, Round Two.
• And meanwhile … The Queer in STEM study is wrapping up sampling next week!
• Which is no good for effective, um, pollination. Loss of the most common pollinator in a meadow means the others are less loyal to individual flower species.
• But will they make it so? NASA’s shoestring side project in faster-than-light travel.
• What worked once, worked once. How to stop worrying and love the tenure track; and a dose of perspective on this kind of advice.
• Re-writing history or making it better? Alan Turing may finally get a posthumous pardon for an “indeceny” conviction that carried a sentence of chemical castration … but is that really the right thing to do?
• A quarter of the price, for a 76% failure rate? Massively open online courses aren’t working out so well for college students.
• Use gloves, folks. On the dangers of becoming allergic to the things you study.

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Sure, it’s not good for you, but is sugar toxic? Photo by howzey.

• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! A guest post calls for escalation in the “arms race” against aggressive mimics in scholarly publishing. And I picked a fight with a Canadian nerd-rapper.
• Which is more relentless? A new study projects climate change will happen way too fast for vertebrate animals to adapt; but see my take at The Molecular Ecologist.
• In evolution, and in scientific thought. Reflections on the importance of founder effects.
• Satisfying the grasshopper and the ant? Cities that plan to prevent—and mitigate—climate change reap short-term benefits, too.
• Depends what you mean by “toxin,” of course. Is it appropriate to call sugar a toxin?
• For future reference. The WEIRDness of evolutionary psychology, quantified.
• I mean, really. Preferring non-science over science for aesthetic reasons is just kind of embarrassing.
• Let me get back to you on that. Does the self-correcting paradigm of science move too slowly?
• Vicious cycle. If you lose sleep because you’re worried about something, sleep deprivation will make the axiety worse.
• Men can still wear whatever they were wearing when they rolled out of bed. How women can dress for success in academia.
• And it’s not getting better. Handgun safety is a public health problem.
• Proof-of-concept, anyway. Silencing an entire extra chromosome to cure Down’s Syndrome.

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Some web? Photo by feral godmother.

• Eek. Workers on a North Carolina hog farm are carrying multi-drug resistant Staphylococcus bacteria.
• Sure, why the hell not? A project to detect hazardous asteroids is going to be crowdfunded.
• For all your biological-numerical needs. The bionumbers database.
• Phylogeny matters. In the community structure of Cuban anoles.
• Well, okay then. Spiderwebs are electrostatically attracted to insects … but we don’t know whether that matters.
• Bollocks in, bollocks out. How a hair sample allegedly from Bigfoot turned out to contain DNA sequence from just about every other mammal.
• Do your [testes] hang low? Not if you’re Afrotherian. A surprisingly thorough, and unsurprisingly entertaining, investigation of the evolutionary origin of the scrotum.
• Beepocalypse not yet. In spite of ongoing worries about colony collapse disorder, it looks like U.S. commercial beekeeping is pretty stable.
• As they say, it’s just gas. One of the signs of planets in orbit of distant stars may not be created by planets after all.

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Photo by jby.

• Again. In which bad science in the service of sexism gets its comeuppance.
• There is a whole blog about corvids. And they know how to pull tails.
• Guys, there are taste receptors on your balls. And also on a lot of other parts of your body, apparently.
• “Wait … these lionfish are overweight?” The invasion of lionfish is so bad that the fish are obese.
• Leprosy is, evolutionarily, mighty stable. What was discovered by sequencing bacterial DNA from the bones of 14th-century lepers.
• Mendel v. Fisher. Why scientists screw up, and why the solution is more science.
• The dot’s barely even blue. Earth, photographed in extreme not-close-up.
• ““To do science is to search for repeated patterns, not simply to accumulate facts …” Reading Robert MacArthur’s Geographical Ecology.
• New bird species discovered! In the suburbs of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
• Like burning down the forest and replanting it to kill off some weeds, but still. Bone marrow transplants appear to have eliminated HIV infections in two more patients.
• This’ll come in handy. Teaching evolution through the lens of infectious disease.
• Sure, the paper’s retracted … but who’s got the movie rights? The story of a retracted Nature paper involves break-ins, tampering with experimental material, and hidden cameras.

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