Young chimpanzees at play. Photo by Tambako the Jaguar.

• The correlations are suggestive, except when they’re not. Thoughts on a study that connects “maternal” feelings to hormone levels and “feminine” facial features, by Kate Clancy and Scicrious.
• Shiny! Paleontologists reconstruct the colors of a fossilized moth.
• You have to admit, it’d be pretty cool. Other paleontologists basically invent a giant superintelligent prehistoric squid out of thin air.
• Raising the wrong kind of awareness. Seeing chimpanzees in entertainment programming may be setting back efforts to save wild chimps.
• Welcome to the future, if your insurance covers it. Genetically-engineered adult stem cells cure a genetic liver disease.
• Not so much a needle as the whole haystack. Sequencing the genome of the bacterium responsible for bubonic plague suggests that there isn’t just a single gene that made it so deadly.

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“… all they’re doing is shooting a blast of hot bacteria full force onto your hands.” Photo by eatmorechips.

• Much like my transition to regular coffee drinking. Ancient proto-whales’ transition from terrestrial to aquatic life is recorded in their teeth.
• Non-anthropologists should also take note. Anthropology gets a dressing down, from an anthropologist.
• So is it possible to get high on fake weed? The placebo effect may work through the same biochemistry as a marijuana high.
• Pretty fast, all things considered. The path of a publication, traced from initial observation to acceptance, over a mere three years.
• Hot-air driers: gross as well as ineffective. The disease-fighting possibilities, and failures, of public restroom design.
• Science writers commemorate teachers who got them started.
• I, for one, etc. A new brain-machine-brain interface gives monkeys prosthetic limbs with a sense of touch. (See also.)
• Eventually. Tortoises are not social animals, but they can learn by watching other tortoises.
• With nuance. Charles Darwin, animal rights advocate.

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Nothing like the real thing. Photo by Jamie Anderson.

• It’s a magical-seeming discovery! The molecular biology of miracle fruit, which makes sour taste sweet.
• For one thing, you can’t get lost in a map. Seeing a place is not the same as physically moving around within it—on a neurological level.
• I’m just catching up on these, I know. Sarcozona interviews Jeremy Fox, Zen Faulkes, and Jean Burns.
• When you’ve got eight to start with … Spiders deal with missing legs pretty quickly.
• Shiny! Fossilized in the right conditions, beetles keep their colors for millions of years.
• Sample size matters. A Bayesian perspective on understanding Amazon seller ratings.
• Top-notch long form. The biologist behind “arsenic life,” profiled.
• Jurassic cluck. A paleontologist wants to recreate dinosaurs from chickens.
• Knowing the limits. Defining expertise in terms of what you don’t know.
• More than a pinch. The salinity of the world’s oceans, measured from orbit.
• No fruit salad is safe. The latest food-bourne illness outbreak is from contaminated cantaloupe.

And now video, via Kevin Zelnio, of the sand tiger shark’s embryonic, siblicidal cannibalism. Ew?

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Easter Island. Photo by vtveen.

• Easter Island is no Greenland. The collapse of Polynesian society on Easter Island may not have been due to ecological damage, but a terminal case of Europeans.
• Angry Birds can’t do that. Players of an online game have resolved the structure of a key HIV protein.
• The kids are all right. David Dobbs draws together emerging research on the brains of teenagers.
• You’re running late. But so is everyone else. Our perception of the present is really a remembrance of the immediate past.
• Fortunately, I hear that the honey badger doesn’t care. The popular idea that honey guide birds lead honey badgers to beehives is probably a myth.
• Hold your horses, Jean-Baptiste. Heritable epigenetic changes to gene expression may not have much impact over evolutionary time.
• Predator becomes prey. Ground beetle larvae prey on much larger frogs and toads by luring them in for an attack.

And finally, via SciAm, the peacock spider. Check out that thorax!

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No in-flight drinks on this trip. Photo by pheanix.

• Take note, Book of Leviticus. Menstruating women are not poisonous.
• Oops? As many as half of all neuroscience papers may make a basic statistical error.
• Talk about commitment. Migrating birds supply themselves with water by breaking down their own muscles.
• Well, why not? The placebo effect may be as much about waiting room décor as it is about a well-designed sugar pill.
• First, remove the stack of unread manuscripts from thine own inbox. Is peer review broken, or are we all just lousy peers?
• Billions. The costs of introduced insects, estimated.
• Not a monster-themed alternative history, either. Abraham Lincoln, forensic meteorologist.
• Hundreds of billions. The economic return on investment of ones of billions in NIH research funding, estimated.
• Wait. Rats’ ears can ring? A possible cure for ringing ears, demonstrated in rats.
• Prince, biologist, geologist, anarchist, fan of Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Eric Michael Johnson interviews the author of a new biography of Peter Kropotkin.
• Might be pretty humid, though. Astronomers identify an exoplanet about the right distance from its primary to support life as we know it.
• Brains aren’t as hard to come by as we thought. A new phylogeny of the molluscs supports four independent origins of complex brains.

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A caribou in Denali National Park, Alaska. Photo by blmiers2.

• Biodiversity riches needn’t beggar their neighbors. Longstanding conventional wisdom that protected wild areas depress the economies of nearby communities turns out to be untrue.
• You say you want a revolution? Humans may riot not because we’re evolved to riot; but because we’re not evolved to deal with stressful times.
• Not unlike wearing a wedding band. The decision to take your spouse’s last name when you marry may say a lot about you, except when it doesn’t.
• And, yes, like humans. Even though it sounds like whistling, dolphins form sound by vibration, just like other mammals.
• Interesting yes, but not quite enlightening. It’s no surprise that conservatives and liberals think differently, so it’s probably not surprising that their brains look different.
• To panic, or not to panic? A conversation about the upcoming, highly-researched pandemic film Contagion.
• Simultaneously awesome and disgusting. A virus prompts caterpillars to climb to the top of a tree, then melts their flesh.

Nasty stuff, regardless of where you drink it. Photo by Darby Rose.

• Which is why I stick with gin and tonic. “Four Loko” might not be extra-intoxicating because it combines caffeine and alcohol, but because it doesn’t taste alcoholic.
• Go easy on the pawpaw, too. Too many carrots can, in fact, turn you orange.
• When he helps with the cover-up, I think probably yes. When a graduate student falsifies results, is his or her advisor responsible?
• Forty. Percent. Profits. The case against for-profit academic publishing. (But see also.)
• Good digestion goes a long way. Mice fed “probiotic” bacteria seem to be less stressed out.
• I’m sure we’re all glad to know that the tick phylogeny is now much clearer. A rare and unique species of tick has been rediscovered in South Africa almost thirty years after it was last seen.
• “We had Kate Winslet learning how to pipet.” The new film Contagion aims to accurately portray an emerging epidemic.
• Especially great if you’re shopping for a graduate advisor. If you haven’t already, go check out Sarcozona’s ongoing series of interviews from the ESA meetings.
• Yes, it’s a link to another linkfest. Ed Yong picks his favorite online science writing of August 2011.

Beerquake. Photo by dongga BS.

Boy, did I ever pick the right time to visit North Carolina. If only there were some sort of widely-available medium through which working geologists could explain what shook up the East Coast on Wednesday …

• Darwin and Boyle were way into dice-playing. Biology and chemistry are more than just extra-complicated physics, because they deal in randomness.
• Introducing Ms. Homunculus. Scicurious discusses a new map of brain regions activated by stimulation of the vagina.
• Mad science in a good cause. A proposed new treatment for malaria would work by microwaving the patient.
• Maybe what they need is a well-written Wikipedia page? People who grew up with Internet search engines don’t know how to use them effectively. (See also.)
• One thing’s for certain: there’s more taxonomizing to be done. A new study suggests that taxonomy isn’t endangered after all; but see also.
• The “underwater view” will haunt my dreams. Lampreys really, really hate the smell of rotting flesh.
• It comes in pints! The new Sam Adams Boston Lager Glass (TM) may not be the paragon of beer-containment that it claims, but it is the latest in a long history of cups, beakers, and tankards.
• Defining a new adaptive zone for evolutionary ecology. The observation that anoles living in different micro-habitats had different body types, and that those body types might be related to life in the micro-habitats, was first published fifty years ago.
• That burbling sound is “Thus Spake Zarathustra” playing underwater. Now dolphins are using conch shells as tools.

Finally, from a compilation of timelapse videos of plants, here’s climbing morning glory. Tropisms in action!

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Is that a tennis ball in your pocket, or asymmetric hypertrophy of your iliopsoas? Oh. It’s a tennis ball. Photo by Steve9091.

• Quick, tell Coach Schtitt to change up the drills. Something about the athletic demands of tennis leads high-level players to develop asymmetric bums.
• Nothing revolutionary comes easy. Engineering grain plants that can host nitrogen-fixing bacteria would be an historic breakthrough for agriculture, but it won’t be simple.
• Try not to forget. Memory really doesn’t work the way most people think it does, in a lot of important ways.
• Like my relationship status with “food miles.” Even when you do the math, figuring out what lifestyle choices are most sustainable is complicated.
• But even so … It’s pretty clear that biking to work is the greenest choice available.
• Fitness measures are harder to get than you’d think. A large-scale experiment in Nebraska will finally directly test the hypothesis that light-colored mice are better camouflaged on light sand dunes.
• Oops. Pheromone-based traps for Japanese beetles not only don’t work, they attract more beetles.
• Question left begging: which is scarier, a brown recluse, or MRSA? Lots of reported spider bites might actually be soft-tissue bacterial infection.

You must admit, it doesn’t look comfortable. Photo by Soller Photo.

• A movable feast. The neurochemical explanation for those viral videos of dancing squid sushi.
• Or, you know, don’t fragment the habitats. To offset the effects of habitat fragmentation and help natural populations adapt to changing climate, just add gene flow.
• The knight’s burden is a heavy one, literally. Was medieval chivalry undone by the sheer weight of knights’ armor?
• Coming soon: age-defying low-iodine diets. Axolotls are neotenic salamanders, meaning they become sexually mature without developing the “adult” characteristics other salamander species typically have—unless you dose them with iodine.
• Reviving, not revived. After being fished nearly to extinction, the Atlantic cod population—and rockfish, and haddock—may finally be reviving.
• We traded guts for brains. Compared to other mammals, humans have unusually big brains for our body size, which means that we also have rather odd bodies.
• And we’re not talking about “Tag” body spray. The African crested rat deters predators by slathering itself in poison.
• These congratulations will not be withdrawn later. Retraction Watch completed its first year of following up on post-publication reviews and refutations this week—well done!