Sally Ride. Photo by WikiMedia Commons.

• She defied gravity. Sally Ride, the first female U.S. astronaut—and only queer astronaut?—died this week. See also, also, and also.
• Quiet, honey! Hungry bats zero in on the sound of flies mating.
• I think yes. Do evidence-based teaching methods need to start addressing motivated reasoning?
• Is anyone surprised? The geometry of herd responses to a predator suggests sheep are selfish.
• Sure, why the hell not? Is open-access on the verge of “disrupting” academic publishing?
• War on facts, round infinity. Government-funded research did, in fact, create the Internet.
• Isn’t this like making Solo cups out of steel? Shark teeth are covered in fluoride, which may mean they never get cavities.
• It’d be … kinda gross. If Spiderman’s anatomy more properly paralleled a real spider’s.
• You’re doing it wrong. Pronouncing “Muller’s Ratchet”, that is.
• Gooey suicide bombers. In one species of termites, aging workers end their careers as suicide bombers.

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This is a cashew fruit. No, but really. Photo by Joe Athialy.

• Mazel tov! Jeremy Fox has left the Oikos blog to start his own site, Dynamic Ecology.
• Puts my Evolution 2012 hangover in perspective. If you thought conferences were exhausting and stressful, try attending one with migraines.
• This is a problem. But we knew that, right? It’s (way) easier to illegally download a copy of Science than it is to use the subscription access system.
• Meet the “nocebo effect.” When the social and psychological cues surrounding medecine make you feel worse.
• “The Air Force wanted to reassure people that it was OK to use atomic weapons …” Part of the reason five men agreed to stand underneath a nuclear explosion.
• Although disseminating Newsweek cover stories doesn’t help. No, the Internet is not making people crazy.
• Sure, why the hell not? Is it possble that papers in high-profile journals collect more citations because of greenbeard effects?
• It’s more interesting than that. Oxytocin isn’t a love drug.
• Huh. Cashew “nuts” aren’t the part of the cashew plant that inspired people to cultivate cashews.
• Best new thing ever, or maybe this month. Randall Munroe has launched an xkcd spin-off devoted to answering bizarre hypotheticals with real physics and math: like pitching a baseball at lightspeed, the odds of getting a perfect SAT score by guessing, and the prospects of a Yoda-powered generator.
• Woah. Images of lightning within a storm that wrapped around Saturn.

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Canadian Parliament, which is apparently composed of wizards. Photo by jby.

• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! We went to Evolution 2012, and Sarah Hird tried to decide what to do when her paper was accepted by a “predatory” journal.
• I’m shocked, shocked! In which Huffington Post and the Daily Mail manage to screw up coverage of dinosaur sex.
• I’m sure there’s a game theory model to explain this. The ongoing fight between proponents of group selection and kin selection has surprisingly peaceful origins.
• Because they’re underrepresented, actually. Why members of underrepresented minorities in academia should have blogs.
• Good thing they’re so stupid. Oppossums are exceptionally resistant to poisoning, and the molecule that protects them also works for rats.

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Ottawa skyline. Photo by dugspr.

Short list this week, what with my preparations for the Evolution meetings in Ottawa. (In fact, I’m there right now!) I’ll be writing about the meetings with the crew over at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, so check there for updates. In other science-y news:

• Excuse me, I have some textbook illustrations to throw out. Like, all of them. A new, 150-million-year-old fossil suggests that most dinosaurs had feathers.
• It’s either God or the missing link. Headlines differ. Physicists announced this week that the Large Hadron Collidor has found evidence of a new particle that could be the Higgs Boson. See also: a good Q&A here, and a great (original) visual analogy here.
• Can’t make trees into coal if the fungi get there first. When fungi evolved the capacity to digest woody tissue, coal formation slowed way down.
• Although causation could go either way. The cat-associated parasite Toxoplasma gondii is associated with greater suicide risk in infected humans.

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A blue tit. Photo by Sergey Yeliseev.

• Congrats! Winners of this year’s 3 Quarks Daily science prize announced.
• Man, tits are assholes. If their mates’ feathers are drab, male blue tits neglect their chicks.
• Because we all want to read about how we’ve been judged. An inside look at the newNSF pre-proposal review process: part 1, part 2.
• Just in time for Pride. What would’ve been Alan Turing’s centennial birthday.
• But is that the point? Political scientists are no good at making predictions.
• Check the terms of your reprint agreement! Or you might find your dissertation for sale online.
• Just one more reason not to nap in the Arctic ocean. If your favorite prey is asleep, you don’t have to move fast to catch it.
• Three words: sky crane maneuver. The technical challenges involved in landing the next Mars rover are formidable, and the solutions are downright awesome.
• I need to brush up on my matrix algebra. A new look at the Prisoner’s Dilemma may show how power imbalances arise.
• And is teaching it to watch cat videos on YouTube. Google has built a neural network of computers.
• Which analysis is not, alas, available for review yet. A case of scientific misconduct uncovered by a new statistical analysis.
• Ecology of ecologists. Ecological methods applied to figure out how many people subscribed to the ECOLOG list in 1992, discover why women are underrepresented in science and engineering, and estimate population density of hipsters in Vancouver.
• But maybe that was your plan all along? If your theory paper has too many equations in it, non-theoreticians won’t cite it.
• Hint: it’s not the Chesapeake Bay. How presidential elections are influenced by a 100-million-year-old coastline.
• Tastes like burning! Why chili peppers are hot—and why they aren’t hotter.
• Whoops. Selecting tomatoes for their bright red color also inadvertently selected them to taste lousy.

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A black bear. Photo by ucumari.

• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! David Hembry looks back on changes in ecology and evolutionary biology over the course of his dissertation research; and the contributors make plans for Evolution 2012.
• Have you submitted somthing for the Pride edition of Diversity in Science? You should do that now.
• Competition between scientific tribes? A few choice complaints about the debate over group selection.
• Spoiler alert: No. Do women prefer more complex music when they’re ovulating?
• Kinda. Black bears can count.
• The chicken-salad sandwich in your lunch box doesn’t count. Paleontological evidence of mammals that ate dinosaurs.
• Philip V. Tobias, 1925-2012. A lifetime of evolutionary anthropology, eulogized.

And finally, Grist reports that the kakapo, New Zealand’s delightfully odd ground-dwelling parrot, is less endangered than it used to be, thanks to considerable effort by some very tolerant conservation biologists. Tolerant of what? Well, let’s go to the video:

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Adelie penguins are total freaks, you guys. Photo by es0teric.

• Time’s running out! You only have until Saturday night at 11:59 to vote for me (or somebody) in the 3 Quarks Daily 2012 Science Prize.
• In which opposable thumbs are less important than you thought. Self-pleasuring behavior of horses.
• Straight apples, queer oranges. A big new study of children with gay and lesbian parents doesn’t actually study children raised by gay and lesbian couples.
• How would you even identify an autistic fish? No, Prozac in the water didn’t make fish autistic.
• I, for one, have always said it was more like Parcheesi. Why ecology is not like billiards.
• Interesting—not apocalyptic. Increasing soil nitrogen makes carnivorous plants use less nitrogen from their prey.
• No behavioral diversity please, we’re British. Hilarious Edwardian-era notes on observations of penguin sex.
• Oops? Groundbreaking and irrefutable research links sea level rise to the prevalence of homosexuality.
• If you squint. How the biology in Prometheus could kinda sorta make sense.
• Publishing, by the number. The new open-access journal PeerJ offers all-you-can publish for a flat fee; and here are some notes about what that fee ought to be.
• But, but … the internet? Kids today have about the same ability to concentrate that they did in 1983.
• Oops. Not only does culling vampire bat colonies not reduce the prevalence of rabies—it makes it worse.
• The original Old Masters. Revised dating estimates suggest that the oldest-known cave paintings were made by Neanderthals.

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Enjoying tempura? Thank the Maillard reaction. Photo by christianyves.

• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Making sense of genome reduction.
• There was/wasn’t something in the air. How giant prehistoric insects went extinct.
• Sounds like a mess, if an entertaining one. The “science” of Prometheus.
• Baking soda in my sauteed onions? Okay, then. Pretty much everything great about cooked food comes down to one chemical reaction.
• Once you know what to look for, you see it everywhere. Mounting evidence that the recent increase in autism diagnoses is due to changes in diagnostic practice.
• We live on geology. The billion-year geologic history that created an Arizona mining town.
• Train one-trick ponies. Some helpful thoughts about managing undergraduate minions in the lab.
• Clever girls! Humbolt squid coordinate hunting movements.
• He’s gonna need a bigger chainsaw. Carl Zimmer tries to slay a zombie meme.
• Memo to scientists: Don’t be dicks about making research results interesting to lay people.
• Difference this will make in the debate about birth control access: zero. Turns out that the “morning-after” pill doesn’t prevent fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus—it actually prevents eggs from being fertilized in the first place.
• With a link to a great cautionary example. Synthetic science is only as good as the data it synthesizes.
• Keep this one in your back pocket: The platypus fallacy.

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Fire ant: “Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.” Photo by AJC1.

• Have you signed the White House petition for open access? WHY HAVEN’T YOU SIGNED THIS PETITION? Go sign this petition.
• “… not easily translated or generalisable to the normal population” The case of a man who doesn’t forget anything.
• “A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain.” Insect stings, ranked by painfulness and described in poetic detail.
• God (or whoever) help us all. Who let David Brooks read about evolutionary psychology?
• Or is it just … resting? Is there an adaptive function for sleep?
• Beautiful! But mostly from a distance. Underground constellations of glowing carnivorous cave-worms.
• In mice. Transplanted nerve cells relieve chronic pain.
• Pretty sure I can’t make the call in 50 milliseconds, without clothing or hair cues. The details of that study on “gaydar” are stranger than you might think.
• In mice! Eating on a schedule, rather than snacking all day, reduces weight gain.
• Nothing fishy about it. A fossil fish with a backbone segmented into neck, back, pelvic, and tail bones suggests that segmented backbones first evolved for swimming, not walking.
• Back to the future. To build radiation-hard computers for outer space, NASA is devloping new miniaturized vaccum tubes.

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