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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There’s more than one way to be a successful granular poison frog. Photo by brian.gratwicke.

• This year, in Snowbird. The blog-teams from Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! and The Molecular Ecologist are headed to the Evolution meetings, which start today in Snowbird, Utah. Watch both blogs for updates, or keep an eye on #Evol2013 on Twitter.
• Oh, and also: I was interviewed for an article about using online social media and mobile apps at conferences.
• In, to be clear, naked mole rats. Naked mole rats don’t get a lot of cancer, and a single molecule might explain a lot of that resistance.
• “This is a fabulous result for patients, physicians, scientists, and common sense.” An interview with the scientist who discovered the gene at the center of last week’s Supreme Court patent law decision.
• Or, you know, everyone. Why the ruling against gene patenting empowers everyone who as genes.
• One problem, many solutions. Trade-offs between color, behavior, and posion production in poison-arrow frogs.
• To PrEP or not to PrEP? The hurdles of including pre-exposure prophylaxis in HIV prevention plans.
• The fruits of homophobia and sex-phobia. A new documentary examines the HIV epidemic in the rural American South.
• Did your Ph.D. land you a full-time job? The Chronicle of Higher Education wants to know.
• It’s endosymbionts all the way down. You will not believe how many different kinds of interdependent bacteria are living as endosymbionts of citrus mealybugs.

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Photo by BarackObama.com.

• About that study of queer-identified folks in STEM: It’s off to a great start.
• No prior (heh) experience needed. A nice introduction to Bayesian statistics.
• But it’s maybe okay if you don’t mind being arrested by mistake. Why ubiquitous survelliance is a problem even if you don’t mind being watched—and that’s before we account for the how hard it is to prove innocence once suspicion is sparked.
• In mice. Gene knockouts that cause obesity and obssessive-compulsive behavior cancel each other out.
• At a zoo, even! Advice on finding a post-PhD career outside academia.
• Bout damn’ time. How television weather-people are coming around on global warming.
• What one thing should change in undergrad classes? Maybe you’d remove all the desks.
• You’re out of luck if you work with plants. When scientists take the Up-Goer Five challenge
• SCOTUS tries to rule on the Central Dogma. The U.S. Supreme Court rules that naturally occurring DNA sequences may not be patented. But the text of the decision [PDF] is drawing complaints from people who know actual biology, and one justice admitted in his concurrence that he doesn’t understand the science.

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Paleo-dieting Hiwi-style? Hope you like roast iguana. Photo by christophedemulder.

• Not at all the way it works in science. A brief guide to the way evolution works in science fiction.
• Woah. A project in nanotech fabrication captures images of the breakup and formation of carbon-carbon bonds.
• Yeah, don’t do this. Where “this” is e-mailing perfectly nice scientists and science writers and asking them to do your homework for you.
• Sweet. Candy company Mars launches a project to sequence the genomes of crops that are staples in the developing world.
• “… except perhaps, for Google+ posts.” Social media postings correlate with formal citations of scientific papers.
• Star Trek is for nerds; Star Wars is for geeks. The difference between nerds and geeks, quantified.
• Want to eat like a hunter-gatherer? First you’ve got to decide which kind of hunter-gatherer you are.
• “Evolutionary traps” When human-created environmental change turns adaptations into maladaptations.
• Color, insulation, even defense. What use were feathers before dinosaurs evolved flight?

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