When your legs are adjusting to exercise, so is your brain. Photo by eccampbell.

• Brains are more like brawn than we thought. Trials in lab rats show that brain tissue can burn glycogen, just like muscle tissue.
• Ladybuisness with a twist? If vaginal pH can determine vulnerability to infection, should women use acidic tampons, or even douche with lime juice?
• Evolutionary innoculation. A toxic introduced plant has apparently helped Australian lizards evolve resistance to cane toads’ toxin.
• Drowning them out under water. New evidence shows that human-created sounds can interfere with whale song.
• Getting by with a little help from our friends, and our ancestors. Comparing groups of human children, chimpanzees, and capuchin monkeys solving the same puzzle shows that humans get ahead by collaboration.
• Practical chemistry. Pseudonymous authors point out that it’s not so hard to make cold medecine at home—from crystal meth.

And, via Carin Bondar, a video illustrating evolution using drawings “evolved” by elementary school students.

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Yosemite National Park. Photo by Genista.

• Does this mean I’m a chestnut tree? Winter day length and temperature cues prompt chestnut trees to shut down their internal clocks.
• How something that big be so hard to find? The largest known dinosaurs—contenders for largest animals ever—aren’t all that well known after all.
• The death of Einsteinian physics is greatly exaggerated. Reports of faster-than-light travel by neutrinos turn out to be due to instrumental error.
• Nowhere to go but uphill, and nowhere uphill to go. Alpine chipmunks in Yosemite National Park are losing the evolutionary race against climate change.
• Menu price: $300,000. The first lab-grown hamburger will be ready later this year.
• Get thee to a genome sequencer. Seeds from a 30,000-year-old squirrel cache have been successfully raised in the greenhouse.
• Suddenly, lab-grown meat sounds a lot better. New evidence that drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus has jumped from humans to pigs, and back.
• The ultimate in parental paranoia. To protect against nest predation, female hornbills walls herself inside her own nest.
• The devil’s in the error rate. A new technology for collecting DNA sequence data is almost ready for prime-time.
• How the Pill works. A handy illustrated guide.
• First awe, then snark. Ed Yong encounters blue whales.

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Careful in that dodgeball game—your competitiveness could activate inflammation. Photo by How I See Life.

• Remembering those who went before. DNLee celebrates Black History Month by commemorating the work African American scientists, including zoologist Roger Airliner Young and animal behavior scientist Charles Henry Turner. And look for more stories in the upcoming February 2012 edition of the Diversity in Science blog carnival—or submit your own.
• Climategate-gate. A big leak of documents reveals a conservative think-tank seeking to eliminate climate change from basic science education.
• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! C.J. Jenkins celebrates Valentine’s Day by making sense of sexual reproduction.
• Advice for prospective grad students. Don’t overlook the possibilities offered by the M. Sci..
• Keep it friendly. Could competitive social interactions promote inflammation reactions?
• It’s protein, Jim, but not as we know it. The biochemistry of life at eighty degree Centigrade.
• Coming soon, to a basement near you? How to stop worrying and learn to track alien crickets.
• Cutest black market ever? The trouble with tiny turtles.
• It can be done! How to succeed on the tenure track without S/Nature papers.
• Their archiving method is a bit … unorthodox. Wood rats as the “librarians” of the desert.
• For you, not so much. But for your dog … The origins and dangers of chocolate poisoning.
• Fact-checking the Dowager Duchess. What “Downton Abbey” got right—and wrong—about the Spanish flu epidemic.
• In case you need a reason for that Friday whiskey-and-soda. The not even remotely market-based way in which an economics Ph.D. finds a job.

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Bison. Photo by USFWS Mountain Prairie.

• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Making sense of inbreeding depression and ineffective plant defenses.
• Maybe more surprising: Other spiders don’t. Jumping spiders use their leg muscles.
• Can nothing slow the clap? Antibiotic-resistant strains are becoming so common that gonorrhea may soon be untreatable.
• Not a very discerning bunch, or nothing to discern? Double-blind testing reveals that club drug users can’t tell “ecstasy” from methamphetamine.
• We expect more from a hallucinogen. A new study of brain activity in response to ‘shrooms doesn’t tell us much.
• Nine million killed. Per year. The economics of American bison’s near extinction.
• “Dear Dr. Kitty …” In which it is conclusively shown that faculty members are much harder to herd than mere cats.
• It’s science and a fetish. Reconstructing the details of dinosaur sex.
• There’s an app for that. Want to get a sense for how the world looks with synaesthesia?
• Is 500 downloads good? Sure! Want folks to read your new paper? Make it open access, and tweet the link.
• Mutation happens. Far from being “living fossils,” coelocanths have been, and are still, evolving.
• Great, as long as it eats the plastic we want it to. A rainforest fungus eats plastic.
• In case you hadn’t given up on them yet. The Susan G. Komen Foundation’s dodgy relationship with science.

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Actually, they’re kind of the opposite of “solo” cups. Photo by arvindgrover.

• Off with the blinders. The science blogosphere grapples with womens’ experiences in science: outright harassment as well as “benevolent” sexism, and how those of us with only one X chromosome can—and should—think about what we don’t see.
• As many as there are scientists. Kevin Zelnio launches the #IamScience hashtag to highlight non-traditional paths to the lab, starting with his own. See also: the tumblr This is what a scientist looks like.
• “… it was a different experience from feeling high” A tranquilizer that’s been widely abused as a club drug may offer a new approach for treating depression.
• It’s also activated by cocaine. Biologists identify the bit of the brain that gets turned on by caffeine.
• Pics or it didn’t happen, Jonah. Searching for an historical account of a human swallowed by a whale.
• Flip! The social importance of the red “Solo” cup.
• If you can’t stand the heat, pretend it’s not getting hotter? Another burst of climate change denialism hits major papers in the U.S. and U.K.
• Blurry vision. To identify big questions in science (or any field, really), look past the details.
• Now I want some fossils. A neontologist digs through a box of fossils.
• For instance, they’re apparently tasty. Surprising facts about weaver ants.
• #ArsenicLife ad absurdam.. Now that independent investigators have strongly contested the claim that a strain of exteremophile bacteria can incorporate arsenic into its DNA, the original paper’s lead author denies the contents of her own abstract.

Video of the week, via io9: a “fly-through” view of a nebula, created by NASA using data from the Hubble Space Telescope. Am I the only one who hears the Star Trek: Voyager theme while this plays?

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Wood thrush, or mercury-poisoning canary? Photo by dermoidhome.

• New at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Making sense of humans’ role in the extinction of North America’s big ice age mammals and the evolution of multicellularity.
• Splenda suddenly doesn’t seem so bad. The ancient Romans created the world’s first artificial sweetener. It was a lead compound. And we can still see the resulting poisoning in Roman skeletal remains.
• Not a feeding frenzy; more like a bridge club. Observational evidence suggests that sharks have social lives.
• Silvery spring. Increasing—and worrying—levels of mercury have been detected in common songbirds in the northeastern U.S.
• Sleep on it. Separating good ideas from bad ones requires taking time to not think about them.
• Black, apparently. Reconstructing the color of Archaeopteryx feathers.
• However, the Moon must still hit your eye like a big pizza pie for amore as we know it. Life as we know it probably doesn’t require the Moon as we know it.
• In your pants. Are modern grooming habits creating an extinction crisis?
• Infant mortality, mental illness, and drug use. Just some of the bad things that increase along with greater income inequality.
• Calibrated unfocusedness. Jumping spiders judge distances using blurry vision.

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How many eggs shall I lay? I’ll ask the neighbors. Photo by yanajen.

• Raise a glass (or two or three) for us absentees. I couldn’t make it to Research Triangle Park this year, but the #Scio12 hashtag is nicely busy.
• With, hopefully, lots of extra lives. Why classes should be a little more like video games.
• Keeping up with the neighbors. Flycatchers decide how many eggs to lay in a given season by watching other birds.
• Awkward! Yes, that ostrich is indeed flirting with you.
• Sound advice. When choosing graduate advisers, prioritize personalities over projects.
• I am become life … One of the most enthusiastic funders of synthetic biology is the U.S. military. One goal: greener munitions.
• The truth, putting its boots on. Assessing the fallout from The Atlantic’s bunk report on miRNAs and GM food.
• Eureka! Yeast that clumps! Multicellularity, evolved in a test tube.
• Boom. With citations. In which Kate Clancy and Scicurious bury Jesse Bering’s “deep-thinking hebephile” column under a great big pile of data.
• For straight couples, that is. The per-coital act risk of HIV transmission, calculated.

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Embrace the mask. Photo by Annamagal.

• Welcome to postdoc-dom! DNLee takes a fresh Ph.D. to the Oklahoma State University.
• Recognition by his colleagues, finally. The American Astronomical Society will honor gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny.
• Suck it, George Lucas. This one’s real. Astronomers have produced a data-based rendering of sunset on an extrasolar planet.
• Oops. Lizards on closely-studied islands have become scared of scientists.
• Ten-hut! Just like ants, at least one species of bees produces soldiers.
• Time to get a pseudonym? A survey of online comments sections finds that pseudonymous commenters are better than those posting anonymously or under their real names.
• Arming the locals. Infectious bacteria can pass on virulence genes to native gut bacteria.
• But he still sounds like an asshole. Richard Owen was no creationist.
• Quelle surprise. The genomes of two centenarians reveal no Medelian genes for long life.
• An oldie but a goodie. What can we tell about ancestral human mating behaviors from population genetics?
• Oy. An article in The Atlantic connects some dubious dots.
• Moral of the story: put the good stuff in Figure 1. Why reading scientific papers doesn’t mean what you might think—and shouldn’t.

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Running. Photo by Mark Sadowski.

• Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent muscles. Most human leg muscles operate efficiently in walking and running, but different muscles are at peak efficiency at different speeds.
• Harm reduction reduces harm. Aggressive and innovative public health measures in British Columbia has dramatically cut new HIV infections.
• Getting to zero. What to do about false positive tests for HIV infection.
• Not so vestigial after all? The function of the human appendix may be in recovery from gastrointestinal infections.
• Someone’s gotta provide those articles. A consideration of whether it’s okay to write for Playboy.
• Or, you know, there’s more to “fitness” than sperm motility. In which being attracted to deep-voiced men may not make adaptive sense.
• A depressing thought. Could failures of antidepressants in placebo-controlled tests be due to bad patient sampling?
• That’s one fast camera. New optical and computational tools can capture light waves in motion.
• Convergence in the slow lane. Two-and three-toed sloths have apparently evolved their similar forms independently.
• Requiescat. Pioneering geneticist James F. Crow.
• The power of branding. An elaborately double-blind trial demonstrates that professional violinists can’t tell a Stradivarius from a brand-new violin.

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I think it’s safe to assume this quail is totally high right now. Photo by Hiyashi Haka.

• Last call! If you haven’t taken my reader survey yet, you have until the end of tomorrow! Thanks to everyone who’s already answered!
• Do this now, please. Pitch in to help Jacquelyn Gill fund her trip to Science Online 2012.
• #UnBerable. More responses to Jesse Bering’s latest embarrassment: Kate Clancy advises an anonymous Evidence-Free Science Provacateur and PalMD suggests Scientific American reconsider its relationship with Bering.
• Guess tenure hadn’t been invented yet. How Charles Babbage tried to remove Isaac Newton’s calculus methods from Cambridge.
• Video NSFW if you’re a quail. What we can learn from studying the mating behavior of cocaine-addicted quail.
• Ugh. Satellite images document the spread of operations at the Alberta tar sands.
• Latina mortua est. Vivat lingua Latina! Botanists decide it’s okay to name new species without describing them in Latin.
• It should be the same kind as ecology … What kind of science, if any, is economics?
• A handy checklist. How to apply for a position as a grad student or postdoc.

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