This organic breakfast may not be “chemical free,” but it could change your brain. Photo by lauren glanzer.

Special congratulations this week to Ed Yong, who is officially a full-time freelance writer as of Wednesday. I can only imagine what he’ll achieve now that this science writing thing isn’t restricted to his spare time.

• Please note that “direct” experiments ≠ clearer results. Groundbreaking experiments that would be ethically impossible to conduct.
• Pre-emptive incest? Hermaphroditic scale insects impregnate their offspring just after conceiving them.
• In other words, bugger off, Senator McCain. Why would you want to sample bears’ DNA? Because bears are actually pretty important, for starters.
• No word on whether they also dance quadrilles. Teeny-tiny lobsters buzz to scare off predators.
• The first one alone may cause a spit-take. Four myths about organic agriculture may surprise you quite a bit.
• Or, less likely to draw, anyway. You’re more likely to win at “rock-paper-scissors” if you play blindfolded.
• “Ooooh, changes in grey matter.” Scicurious soft-boils a study purporting to show that eating breakfast changes your brain.
• Population control. When doing observational research on humans, the way you group people into populations may make a big difference.

A queen bee, indicated with a red dot of paint. Photo by reway2007.

• Not so much explanation as warning, really. The intricacies of indirect costs in grant funding, explained.
• Motivation is key. Anoles demonstrate learning ability in an experiment that has them playing find-the-worm.
• Paging Doctor Pangloss? Bats might be most active at night because flying is hot work.
• Long live the queen! The specific protein in honeybee “royal jelly” that makes bee larvae develop into queens has been identified [$a], in part by giving the protein to fruitflies to make “queen” flies.

You probably won’t catch bad eating habits at that cocktail party. As long as you go easy on the canapés. Photo by rocketlass.

Big blogging news this week: Bora Zivkovic and the team at Scientific American have launched a big new network of science blogs, sweeping up a large chunk of my RSS subscriptions, including Kate Clancy, Eric Michael Johnson, Christie Wilcox, Krystal D’Costa, Kevin Zelnio, Jason Goldman, and SciCurious. And just like that, SciAm is the center of the science blogosphere. Congrats to everyone involved!

• When the press release precedes peer review, check your wallet. A whole series of studies proposing that behaviors from divorce to overeating are “contagious” via social ties may be bunk.
• Hoisted on their own statistical petard. A study of dinosaur morphology data using statistical methods invented by Creationists ends up confirming descent with modification.
• Solution: either more funding, or fewer deaths. US Federal funding for research into solutions to infection by drug-resistant Staphylococcus comes to less than $600 per MRSA death.
• Darwin was polite even in pencil. Robert Krulwich examines Charles Darwin’s marginalia.
• They’re elephants with wings! Why you should never piss off a crow.

Leave the chocolate milk. Take the espresso. Photo by confusedbee.

• So counterintuitive, it’s counterfactual. The “chocolate milk diet” thoroughly and painstakingly debunked.
• Proof that baby crows are smarter than the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. A cool new study documents the development of object permanence in crows.
• First step: piss off Richard Owen. How the giant squid was finally accepted as non-mythical.
• Maybe it ain’t so, Stephen Jay. Was the mismeasuring of mismeasurement in Gould’s Mismeasure of Man itself … incorrectly assessed?
• Gray’s position did not make leaps. How Charles Darwin slowly convinced the botanist Asa Gray to ditch creationism, though not Christianity, simply by asking him questions.
• Paging Dr. Pangloss. A clever, but almost entirely untested, hypothesis proposes that our fingers wrinkle up when wet to improve our grip.
• Hope you like pasta. Over at his shiny new blog Science-Based Running, Dave Munger reassesses carb loading.
• In case you missed it. D&T closed out Pride Month by hosting the Diversity in Science blog carnival.
• Go do this right now. Pitch in a few bucks to help Sarcozona attend ESA, so she can write up the international ecology conference.

A rough-skinned newt. Photo by matt knoth.

Don’t forget—Diversity in Science carnival contributions are due Monday!

• I missed this year’s Evolution Meetings in Norman, Oklahoma—but they were the best-Tweeted iteration of the conference yet.
• I’ll have mine scrambled, with the nightshade salad on the side. From those very same meetings, Carl Zimmer reports that neurotoxic newts lay poisonous eggs, too.
• Back off, Kevin Bacon. There’s good evidence that humans have magnetic sensors in our eyes—but can we use them?
• Zombie ladybug bodyguard. A parasitoid wasp preys on ladybugs, then induces them to protect its caterpillar, not unlike Cotesia glomerata.
• The clone that grows together… Artificial selection can induce single-celled yeast to evolve multicellularity.
• Coming out of the dungeon. Scicurious and Krystal D’Costa exchange thoughts on geeks’ place in contemporary culture.
• Not given lightly. When, and when not, to give someone post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV.
• In case you missed it. I snuck an explanation of mutation-selection-drift balance into a big gay blog post; PZ Myers pointed out some things I missed.

And finally, a video sent to me by Dave Giordano, describing field studies of nesting behavior in tropical birds.

Whitetail deer: adorable forces of ecological destruction. Photo by HerpShots.

There’s just a few days left to submit your posts for the Pride Month 2011 edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival.

• But how will we identify vampires now? A new artificial heart design is simpler than other models, pumping blood without creating a pulse.
• Schadenfreude. The production company responsible for the anti-science hack film “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” has gone bankrupt.
• So we’ll have those sharks any day now, right? Living cells engineered to produce green fluorescent protein become the first-ever biological lasers.
• Not mentioned: liberals more likely to accept lousy pay. Why academia might, in fact, have a liberal bias.
• In some cases, yes. Are invasive species as bad as we’ve been led to believe?
• Say it ain’t so, Stephen Jay. To demonstrate that a historic (and racist) study of human skull size was biased by systematic manipulation of data, Stephen Jay Gould systematically manipulated data.
• Save a serviceberry bush—eat venison! A multi-decade experiment provides strong evidence that too many deer are bad for forests.
• Not by running with scissors. How the cave-dwelling isopod lost its eyes

There’s a reason you have to make small talk with your barber. Photo by Dave Fayram.

If you’re gay, lesbian, bi, trans, or straight and supportive, and you have an even slightly science-related blog, why haven’t you submitted a post for the Diversity in Science Carnival? Go, do it now—you can read these great science articles afterward.

• Literal nitpicking. Language may have originally evolved so we could gossip while we groomed each other.
• You get a niche, and you get a niche … Experimental evidence that variable environments support more species.
• Not so super, really. When someone already infected with HIV becomes infected by a second strain of the virus, it’s a superinfection.
• Only seven papers, but six are in Sc’Nature. Ed Yong profiles the man who solved the 3-D structure of DNA and invented “culturomics.”
• Apt. The functions of the facial nerve, illustrated only with pictures of facial expressions.
• Smarts win, except in Australia. Amphibian species with bigger brains tend to be better at invading new habitats.
• Me, I’m in it for the lab coat.* Why it’s cool to be a scientist

—————
* I do not, in fact, wear a lab coat.

Picturesque, but maybe not practical. Photo by jimw.

• Arsenic Life II: The Response-ening. Rosie Redfield responds to responses to her criticism of the “arsenic life” study, and considers how she’d go about testing the original claims; Carl Zimmer discusses how online criticisms like Redfield’s may have changed the way we review scientific results. And the original paper appears in print (alongside critical responses) for the first time this week.
• It’s a simple question of weight ratios. A transportation engineer explains why airships will probably never be widely used.
• The bright side is you get to write another review, right? The trouble with writing about the ethics of an emerging technology is that the state of the art changes very quickly.
• Life’s building blocks aren’t usually re-used to make models of the starship Enterprise. Biological systems’ use of a relatively small set of widely-available building blocks means that life is like LEGO.
• History matters. German towns that had anti-Jewish pogroms in 1349 were more likely to have pogroms in the 1920s.
• ‘Bout time. In the face of ongoing opposition, climate scientists are using stronger language to discuss global warming.
• She’s crossing the streams! Jen McCreight brings science blogging to Savage Love to address the mystery of the G-spot.
• Wait till you find out what works best. The next breakthrough in mosquito repellant might work by overwhelming the bloodsuckers’ antennae.

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Nap time. Photo by bhermans.

• A few CCs of prevention. Antiretroviral treatment is 96 percent effective at preventing HIV transmission between partners.
• Humans as part of our own environment. Stopping the extinction crisis we’re causing may require a new perspective.
• Another reason not to put your phone inside a hive. Cell phone signals may be bad for bees.
• As with all fitness measures, it depends on ecological context. Is there an evolutionary advantage to being right?
• Kill your alarm clock. Compared to the rest of the world, WEIRD* people have weird sleep habits, too.
• Feeding like a whale, millions of years before whales. The toothless ichthyosaur Shastasaurus probably sucked small prey into its mouth.

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* Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic