A moonwalk during the Apollo 11 mission. Photo by NASA.

• The Best Science Writing Online 2012. Now available for pre-order.
• Radar. Remote controls. Artificial ball lightning. Even if you already knew Niccola Tesla was pretty cool, you probably don’t know how cool he was.
• Because high school biology is worth it. Why it’s worth fighting for specific content in high school biology classes.
• The science-blogging snake cites its own tail. The first systematic survey of science blogs published in PLoS ONE; one author blogs about it; and science bloggers weigh in.
• Mainly because terrorists aren’t completely stupid. Why profiling passengers wouldn’t make airport security more effective.
• Show us the p-values. A new genome-wide scan for genes associated with I.Q. gets the genetics right, but still screws up the science.
• Nowhere to go but up, fast. The emergence of faster predators gave prehistoric aquatic reptiles the bends.
• Heh: “the Kennedys of anthropology.” Maggie Koerth-Baker interviews two members of the Leakey family.
• It’s no so much what happens, but what doesn’t happen. The trouble with replicating studies in psychology. (See also.)
• Except with kids. The “golden age” of NASA space exploration wasn’t all that popular at the time.
• Putting the planet on chemotherapy. Proposals to “geo-engineer” a fix for climate change are kinda scary.

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Bees: still not doing well. Photo by net_efekt.

• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! The evolutionary origins of polar bears.
• Fanning the flames. How industry lobbying has created regulations that made flame retardants ubiquitous in American home, even though the chemicals are hazardous, and don’t actually prevent fires.
• There’s a TREE paper somewhere in this blog post. The distinction between genes and environments is not as sharp as you might think.
• Nanotubes—in—space! A new drug delivery method developed by NASA will help more than astronauts.
• Good point, actually. Without randomized controlled trials, how do we know that parachutes work?
• It’s networking, not self-promotion. Why scientists are (still) suspicious of blogging, and why they shouldn’t be.
• And we still don’t know everything responsible. Honeybees are still in trouble.
• Omigod you guys, we’re surrounded by chemicals! The many things Nick Kristof’s crusade against “chemicals” gets wrong.
• Also, kinda gross. These caterpillars may have the prettiest anti-predator defense ever.
• And by “coexisted with,” I mean “eaten.” A giant prehistoric crocodile could’ve coexisted with early humans.
• As anyone who’s been computer-matched to a college roommate could tell you. “Scientific” dating services aren’t actually very good at match-making.
• Teeny-tiny transmitters! To track orchid-visiting bees.

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Wind turbines. Photo by ali_pk.

• Big week for blog carnivals. Fresh editions of Diversity in Science, Berry-Go-Round, and the Carnival of Evolution are online.
• Big fleas have little fleas … Fossils of giant fleas date from, yes, the age of dinosaurs.
• Or, more crowd-funded science than currently, anyway. What will a world of crowd-funded science look like?
• Why so blue, John Carter? On Mars, the sunsets are not like ours on Earth.
• Bonus? Widespread wind turbines might moderate temperature extremes.
• Caveat lector. Advice for reading popular science writing. See also.
• Immune stress, apparently. New evidence for the reason Pygmies are short.

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Sometimes a red dress just looks good when you’re dancing. Photo by Lieven SOETE.

• Oy. A study of high fructose corn syrup and mineral deficiency doesn’t mean that corn syrup causes autism. It really, really doesn’t.
• Double oy. A study finding that politically conservative undergraduates take less time to read essays on scientific topics doesn’t mean they’re refusing to comprehend the content.
• Triple oy. A study of online dating profiles doesn’t mean that we’ve evolved to find red clothing sexy.
• Hmmm. The recently-publicized study showing an association between unacknowledged same-sex attraction and homophobia doesn’t support the idea that most gay-hating is actually externalized self-hatred.
• Quadruple oy, with a backflip. A male OB-GYN’s discovery of previously unseen structures in a female cadaver’s vaginal wall—in a search prompted by his misreading of an unrelated journal article—doesn’t mean he’s found the G-spot.
• It all depends on the numbers. Growing meat tissue in Petri dishes probably won’t be cheaper than growing it in cows.
• BP et al. could’ve done a lot better. Two years after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Christie Wilcox returns to a conversation with her grandfather, an expert in oil spill cleanup.
• Enjoy that last cup. Climate change and increasing worldwide demand mean that coffee is about to get a lot more expensive.
• A good bower needs landscaping. Spotted bowerbirds use “bush tomato” fruit to decorate their nests, and end up planting more bush tomatoes.
• They’re … stubby. Maggie Koerth-Baker tracks down the next trend in bananas.
• Seventy years later. Two of Alan Turing’s original cryptography papers have just been declassified.
• Excuse me while I put in a quick eight miles. Emerging evidence that exercise makes you smarter.
• Taking it one small step at a time. A new startup proposes to mine asteroids, and it might just work.

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A sidewalk produce cart. Photo by bitchcakesny.

• And by “equity,” I mean “inequity.” For the week of Equal Pay Day, here are some notes on pay equity in academia.
• Which is all of us. Excellent advice for scientists who write.
• Whee! 80% cut rate. A report from inside NSF’s new pre-proposal review system.
• Whoops? Re-analysis of decades-old data suggests that the Viking landers may have found evidence of life on Mars back in 1976.
• Follow the leader. Voters follow the gaze of politicians from their own party.
• They’re just worried about everyone else. College students opposed to gay marriage don’t think it would hurt their own marriage.
• Travel distance, for instance. The added cost of eating healthy isn’t just about the price of food. See also.
• Especially in the, ahem, biomedical field. Scientific journals are retracting a lot more papers lately, which doesn’t look good for science. See also, and also.
• Love is: two guys and a girl, and also when one of the guys is pretending to be a girl. The diversity of gender roles in the animal kingdom, adorably anthropomorphized.

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Hyena. Photo by redsea2006.

• Not fans of the vegetarian option, apparently. When humans give up meat for Lent, hyenas give up eating human garbage.
• When two for the price of one isn’t an easy sell. The second body problem in academic job searching.
• Life on the lower transcriptional rung. Rhesus monkeys’ social status is reflected in their gene expression.

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Photo by Arthur Chapman.

• Recently at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Hoatzin gut microbes and multidimensional coevolution.
• Time for a revised version of Jurassic Park? An ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex turns out to have had feathers.
• Not as simple as you think. Video explanations of what a flame is.
• Next time, can we ask someone who’s actually applied to NSF? In which an economist mostly misunderstands the incentives of science funding.
• Monkey curiousity is adaptive. Basic research is worth funding precisely because we don’t know what it’ll be good for.
• Worth a shot. Could science learn how to overcome imposter syndrome from the example of sports?
• Yes, another genome. The stickleback genome helps find new targets of adaptive evolution.
• And there are a few. On the limits to coming out in ecology.
• We don’t need no stinkin’ quarantine. Ant colonies fight infection by spreading it around.

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Hot dog. Photo by stu_spivack.

• Two plus two may equal five, depending on what you’re counting. A series of thought experiments explain why in statistics, numbers need not add up.
• Because of course you were curious. The anatomy of alligator erections, explained.
• In other news, too much food is bad for you. Deborah Blum puts the recent study linking red meat consumption to risk of death in context.
• Teamwork! Pesticides aren’t the sole cause of honeybee colony collapse—but they interact dangerously with other stresses.
• But less likely to be journal editors. Hmm. Women are less likely to turn down requests for peer review.
• And how to cultivate better ones. Author Charles Duhigg tells Steve Silberman how to break bad habits
• Unnatural history. A new kind of museum showcases animals that have been modified by humans.
• My baloney has a first name/ It’s P-A-P-E-R. A new form of processed cellulose—the same plant fibers used to make paper—could replace saturated fat in foods like hot dogs.

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Running! Photo by andronicusmax.

• If you’ve got ’em, use ’em. Eels’ comparatively complex lifecycle may be made possible by extra copies of key developmental genes.
• Yes, it’s real. No, we don’t know why. What science knows—and what it doesn’t—about the runner’s high.
• I don’t think I’d call any crocodilian snout “dainty,” though. The shapes of an alligators’ and crocodiles’ snouts don’t make a difference for the strength of their bites.
• Alas, it won’t produce flour ready-made for Girlscout cookies. Wheat engineered to carry and express genes from mint could repel aphids.
• As if you needed an excuse to build a robotic squirrel. The purpose of ground squirrels’ rattlesnake-repelling tail-waving, tested using a robotic squirrel.
• Because, as we all know, humans stopped experiencing natural selection 20,000 years ago. Is it possible that human speech and music are purely products of cultural evolution, instead of natural selection?
• Less obviously, that is. Fruit flies left to evolve in complete darkness for 1,400 generations change less than you might think.

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Zebra finches. Photo by Lip Kee.

• A whole new meaning for “forgettable.” Is it possible to have sex so good it induces amnesia? Maybe.
• I love evolutionary context! Vaginal microbial communities, in evolutionary context.
• Ack. Tongue-eating fish parasites are more common in over-fished areas.
• More like a sword, really. Behavioral observation reveals the uses of a sawfish’s saw.
• Whatever happened to model rockets? I liked those. In which do-it-yourself biotech becomes a major public health concern.
• Supercoolmicroscopyforunderstandingdeafness? High-resolution microscopy tracks the changes in a zebra finch’s brain cells after it goes deaf.

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