How would you measure scientists’ performance?. Photo by MarcelGermain.

• Tell me who you are, and what you think! Have you taken the D&T reader survey yet? Please do!
• Making sense of your holiday gift list. At Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!, Will Godsoe suggests some books for the biologist in your life.
• Tinker, tailor, soldier … Most people have difficulty remembering other folks’ names, but much less remembering their jobs or hobbies.
• Paging Marshall McLuhan. Kevin Zelnio’s vision for online science outreach.
• All that is advantageous does not fix. The evolutionary importance of drift, succinctly explained.
• With video, this time. Scicurious takes on that study of fear and reproductive output in song sparrows.
• To the victor … Crickets that win fights with other crickets become more aggressive afterward.
• What’s in your metric? Counting journal articles as a metric of scientific achievement still makes sense.
• Neat! Circuits made with gallium-indium alloy can heal their own cracked wires.
• Looks like the TSA could use some peer review. Those body-scanning machines at airports are, in many cases, not as effective as a pat-down.

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Hummingbird in flight. Photo by Jason Paluk.

• Congratulations! The winners of this year’s NESCent science blogging contest have been chosen.
• We’re really not that expensive. Want more scientific discoveries? Well, then maybe we should pay for more scientists.
• Darwin wasn’t a jerk. Nineteenth century shipping timetables confirm that Darwin didn’t screw over Alfred Russell Wallace.
• “The bird is so small and light that its bones are largely transparent to X-rays,” he said. X-ray video reveals the mechanics of hummingbird flight.
• Say it ain’t so, Marty Stauffer! Lots of wildlife photography is staged. But that’s probably not a big deal.
• Another reason to keep it natural. Most humans’ body hair is lousy for insulation, but it does help deter parasites.
• For example, the pain of lying on a slight incline for hours? Microgravity environments may interfere with how astronauts perceive pain.
• One of these things is not like the other. A checklist for distinguishing real science from pseudoscience.
• A useful skill, in a herbivore. Sheep can differentiate between different kinds of food plants.

Video this week: tool use by an orange-dotted tuskfish. Specifically, the fish breaks open a clam by hitting it against a rock. Who needs opposable thumbs?

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You want to dissect my what?! Photo by GAC’63.

• I made the cut. The finalists for this year’s Open Lab compilation of online science writing have been announced, along with many deserving runners up.
• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Luke Swenson described how understanding evolution lets scientists estimate the age of an HIV infection.
• It flows! Well, flowed. The Mars rover Opportunity has found gypsum, a mineral that can only form in the presence of liquid water.
• Meanwhile, even further out in space. The Kepler telescope identifies an Earth-sized planet at about the right distance from its sun for liquid water.
• One nucleic acid is not like another. The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans can transmit traits to its offspring that aren’t encoded in its DNA.
• See also, graduate school. Medical school as a constellation of brief, intimate moments.
• See what happens when you don’t take source-sink dynamics seriously? Herbivorous insects are evolving resistance to genetically modified Bt corn in the U.S.
• Collaborators! Invasive fire ants may be invasive because they work well with aphids.
• Which pretty much explains HuffPo science writing. Some guy at the Huffington Post thinks science writing would be better if science writers stopped listening to scientists.
• Hehe. Ostrich penises. A new detailed study of ostrich penises improves our understanding of bird evolution.
• Getting warmer. Peak attendance dates at national parks have moved about four days earlier over the last 30 years.

Video of the week, via Open Culture: Robert Krulwich describes behavioral experiments that dissected how ants navigate. (You may remember this as the subject of one of Jason Goldman’s earliest posts.)

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Raven in flight. Photo by ingridtaylar.

• In mice! Gene therapy has proven effective at preventing HIV infection.
• Still no opposable thumbs, thank heavens. Ravens gesture to other ravens with their beaks.
• Awww. The embryonic development of anoles, imaged.
• Eight-month-old infants understand justifiable meanness.
• A gene “for” many things, or nothing? Mutations to a single gene may cause many different malformations.
• But only until the flavor runs out. Chewing gum helps you concentrate.
• Romans weren’t so careful about “leave no trace.” European plant communities still show the effects of ancient Roman settlements.
• I mean, seriously. Gender-specific science kits are not a good way to get girls into science, and not really helpful for boys, either.

And lastly, here’s video of a starfish-inspired “boneless” robot in action. Good luck getting to sleep tonight!

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Happy Thanksgiving, U.S. readers. Photo by Bemzilla.

• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Fruit flies prefer mates with the same gut bacteria.
• Worst pets ever? An online ant supplier provides invasive pests.
• Powers combined. The fungus killing frogs worldwide may have originated as a hybrid between non-lethal species.
• The developmental regulatory systems that determine biological sex before birth don’t stop after birth.
• Planning ahead. The U.S. Defense Department’s research arm is thinking about life after antibiotics.
• Hell, yes. Should pepper spray be subjected to clinical trial?
• Maybe. Can a genetic marker predict your impulsivity?

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Lab mouse. Photo by Rick Eh?.

• What’s next, a Nature centerfold? Janet Stemwedel, Anne Jefferson, Christie Wilcox, the Lab Lemming, and Paul Anderson, among others, respond to Jurassic-era “humorous” sexism in the pages of Nature. Kate Clancy proposes occupying the Nature Publishing Group.
• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Making sense of the latitudinal diversity gradient.
• Some folks’ bootstraps are shorter than others’. Academic life isn’t so easy when you don’t enter academia from the middle class.
• Diversity matters. The heavy use of standardized lab mice in biomedical research may have some undesireable consequences.
• And so ad infinitum. An amber-preserved spider has amber-preserved mites.
• Not just in the usual way, either. Mosquitoes engineered to fight malaria may suck.
• Power laws, and laws of power. What probability distributions can tell us about causes of income inequality.
• Backyard science! A plan for behavioral observations of birds at your bird feeder.
• Watch your glass, gals—and guys. “Date-rape” drugs may cause quite a lot of accidental deaths.
• Annals of unsurprising results. Scientific evidence (such as it is) suggests that religion doesn’t make you more moral.
• Less than you might think. The evidence that women in close regular proximity synchronize their menstrual cycles.

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Rice. Photo by tamaki.

• More on “pox parties.” They’re really a bad idea and almost certainly illegal.
• Paging Dr. Roughgarden. Some male marsh harriers look like females—and coexist peacefully with “regular” males as a result.
• We are what we eat, part 2,357. MicroRNAs from rice migrates into your tissue in the course of digestion, and may alter your own gene expression.
• Giving that Thanksgiving “hand turkey” a new significance. The success of sumo wrestlers can be predicted from their handprints.
• Rats on a rising tide. The expansion of humans across the globe is closely tracked by the expansion of rats.
• In which Siri exorcises the ghost of HAL. The iPhone’s new virtual assistant, considered anthropologically.
• Another reason to buy organic. Up to three quarters of honey sold in the US doesn’t contain any pollen—possibly to cover up illegal imports.

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Halloween hangover, anyone? Photo by bunnygoth.

• Spooky science. The Scientific American network goes all Halloweeny.
• Dumb, dumber, downright dangerous. Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children try to immunize them by mailing around childhood viruses.
• Carnival time! The November 2011 Carnival of Evolution is up at The Mermaid’s Tale.
• Last ditch effort. To save bats from white-nose syndrome, researchers propose building an artificial cave.
• Helping science, helping himself. Participating in cognitive research helps a man with schizophrenia cope with his condition.
• Alongside or, you know, underfoot. A newly discovered fossil was a ferret-like mammal that probably lived alongside dinosaurs.
• Whale folksongs? Sperm whales’ songs are probably culturally transmitted.

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Fish, out of water. Photo by las – initially.

• Tradition! Cultural transmission means that different chimpanzee troupes use different food-gathering tools.
• Reality’s liberal bias persists. A formerly climate-skeptical physicist checks the data himself, and confirms that Earth is getting warmer.
• Legless flopping is phylogenetically conserved. Mosquito fish, which routinely leave the water to evade predators, aren’t much better at moving around on land than fish that don’t jump onto shore.
• Leave it to Nobel Prize winners. Two Nobel Prizes were hidden from the Nazis by dissolving them in acid—then later reconstituted and recast.
• This is why I don’t read HuffPo. On Huffington Post, a “holistic podiatrist” is qualified to tell you that vaccines and scientifically tested medicine don’t work.
• Do it for the fun, not the fame and fortune. A hard-nosed consideration of the costs and benefits of blogging, for a scientist.
• Looks like a good read. A new book traces the origins of HIV in humans, back as far as 1921.

And now, video of one gecko saving another from an attacking snake.

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Pills. Photo by aSIMULAtor.

• Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! I launched a shiny new group blog this week. Is it in your RSS feed yet?
• Rant(s) of the week. Scicurious shreds a truly awful discussion of birth control methods; Kate Clancy piles on, and Michelle Clement explains why girlybits aren’t scary.
• See also, connected to natural selection, however tenuously. A not-all-that-recent study shows that people are more likely to believe claims about human psychology if they’re connected to neuroscience, however tenuously.
• Wait. There are also vitamins in food? Vitamin pills are probably not as magical as vitamin pill manufacturers would like you to think.
• Like sex, and death. Some of the more puzzling features of complex life may be explained by the interaction of the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes. (In part.)
• More bloodflow = ?? The colorful blobs on functional MRI brain scans, explained.
• With videos and LOLsagegrouse. Why doesn’t sexual selection eliminate heritable variation in sexual traits?
• First step to smallpox-ville? An experimental malaria vaccine is proving effective in trials.

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