Touching. Photo by WTL Photos.

• Phrase of the week: “mental hangover.” Migraines are mysterious, but we understand even less about their aftermath, the postdrome.
• Sorry, Mom. Why do sons cost their mothers more than daughters, and how do those costs manifest?
• With a bingo card for educational fun! A comprehensive guide to debunking bullshit evolutionary psychology.
• Just like getting into Carnegie Hall. Blind people have more sensitive fingertips, but sighted people can make up the difference with practice.
• Avast! Branding strategies were employed by pirates, and by those who didn’t care for them.
• This is all your fault, game theory. The Rapture may not make theological, scientific, or logical sense—but it may have a basis in game theory.

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Finished! Photo via Boston Public Library.

Graduatin’ tomorrow, movin’ east next week. It’s as though I’ve come to the end of some sort of long, strenuous, athletic activity …

• Because it’s there? Dave Munger wonders why anyone would run a marathon.
• Convergent evolution—in two different directions. The extinct marsupial predators known as thylacines may have had dog-like skulls, but their elbows suggest they hunted like cats.
• Where frequency meets ill-preparedness. The regions where a particular kind of natural disaster causes the most damage are not always the regions where it occurs most often.
• All the fun of opinion polling, with nasal swabs. Recruiting participants for even a small epidemiological study is logistically tricky.
• After olives, the goddess Athena invented wheat-free ambrosia. The history of gluten-related health issues stretches from ancient Greece to your neighborhood Whole Foods.
• Fossilized. Raindrops. It may be possible to reconstruct the density of the ancient atmosphere by measuring fossilized raindrops.
• Next up, Am Nat? The ecology journal Oikos recently launched a blog featuring “armchair ecology” on topics from the value of (judicious) hand-waving arguments to lichinivorous moths.

Video of the week, from the BBC: a time-lapse simulation of fetal face formation. Watch as ontogeny (kinda, sorta, okay not really) recapitulates phylogeny.

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A periodical cicada from brood XII. Photo by JanetandPhil (Correction, 2 June 2011: replaced photo by James Jordan, which depicted the wrong cicada species).

• Still not as fast as on CSI. The lab work for genetic identification of, say, that terrorist mastermind you just killed, goes quicker than you might expect.
• Not named Uroptychus pinnochio because that name is taken already. A newly discovered lobster is distinguished by its prominent rostrum.
• Time to reinstate the noon-time martini. Is lunch in danger of extinction thanks to social anxieties?
• The case of the missing (bird) baby boom. You’d think that the emergence of huge swarms of periodic cicadas would be a boon for bird populations—but you’d be wrong.
• Born that way. “Lesbian” lizards (of the sort discussed here) have been bred in the lab from sexual parents.
• Maybe these were better bird food than cicadas? A two-inch long fossilized ant has been unearthed in Wyoming.

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It’s not easy being green. Photo by Twin Peaks.

Today’s save the frogs day—donate, cut your pesticide use, build a backyard pond, or maybe help an amorous amphibian cross the road.

• Two (thousand) drifters, off to see the world/ there’s such a lot of world to see … Fire ants cross bodies of water by forming themselves into a raft.
• Worse than fashion mags. Seriously. Want to give your teenager body image issues? Subscribe to a fitness magazine.
• Orchids will do anything for pollination. An orchid’s brown-spotted leaves and rotten odor convince flies that the flower is dying from a fungal infection, so they’ll pick up pollen while trying to feed on the fake decay.
• Babies are smarter than we thought. A classical developmental psychology test turns out not to document a bug in the way human infants think about the world, but a feature of social learning.
• Harm reduced. The city of Vancouver has dramatically reduced overdose death rates by opening Insite, a facility that allows addicts to use drugs under medical supervision.
• Cephalopod: A Space Odyssey. NASA will send squids into space on the final flight of the shuttle Endeavour.
• Introspection with your natural history. Brian Switek muses on the future of science writing.

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Ho-hum. Photo by v1ctory_1s_m1ne.

A week from today, I defend my dissertation. Fortunately, Eric Michael Johnson pointed out to me that the most worrisome possible question has been answered. So I’m all set!

• Historical perspective with your marine biology. In which a coral is unceremoniously plucked from the ocean floor after 2,000 years of not-quite undisturbed growth.
• Movin’ north. Predicting how individual species will respond to climate change is often tricky, but the broad trends are crystal clear.
• With our powers combined … Photosynthetic algae plus salamander eggs equals solar-powered salamander eggs.
• Cretaceous cooties. A new phylogenetic analysis suggests that the common ancestor of all modern lice made its living irritating feathered dinosaurs.
• I’m not bored—I’m empathizing! Chimpanzees are more likely to yawn in response to another chimp’s yawn if the other chimp is a member of their own social group.
• Hypothesis testing fail. Do ovulating women buy sexier clothes to be more attractive while they’re most fertile, or because they’ve been objectified by evolutionary psychologists?
• Clean up your act! People seem to cope with disordered environments by relying more upon stereotypes.
• I’m shocked, shocked that this story was misreported! The recently uncovered remains of a “gay caveman” were probably neither gay, nor a caveman.

Wristwatches have a surprisingly deadly history. Photo by wjhall31.

• In which a new technology loses its shine. World War I helped create a fashion for wristwatches with radioactive glow-in-the-dark faces—a fashion that turned deadly.
• Not gay, just confused. Really. Male mice with low serotonin are sexually interested in both males and females, but this is could be because lack of serotonin makes them less sensitive to smell.
• Wow. A 1987 outbreak of radiation poisoning in central Brazil didn’t actually start with an egg sandwich, but the sandwich is when folks started to notice.
• Just as nuclear power is starting to look extra scary. A new “artificial leaf” uses sunlight to efficiently generate hydrogen from water.
• Useless and potentially harmful. Not only does human chorionic gonadotropin not help with weight loss as popularly thought, it can also transmit mad-cow disease.
• Perfect for reading while in queue. Why do airline passengers jostle for quicker access to reserved seats? Maybe because waiting is territorial.
• No one is an island, but we might all be lakes. Advances in understanding the immense diversity of microbes every human being carries around may make medicine more like ecology.

After a long stretch of linkfests bereft of moving pictures, here’s video of a wasp deliberately removing ants from its food. Via Ed Yong, who provides more explanation based on the journal article from which this comes.

Rawr! Photo by pasma.

Wink wink, nudge nudge, Facebook. Say no more.

• You can’t cuddle a wind turbine. Everybody’s worried about the birds killed by wind turbines, but domestic cats kill more than 1,000 times more.
• Evolved in response to complaints from the downstairs neighbors. Giant (well, 26-pound) rabbits that lived on Minorca three to five millions years ago probably didn’t hop.
• File under: more evidence in support of common sense. Regular testing for HIV doesn’t just help prevent transmission—it can also improve health outcomes if infection does occur.
• Best opening anecdote ever? Those penis spines we heard so much about recently might not have the function folks think they do.
• Speak up! When windy conditions make social signalling by head-bobbing less obvious, anoles modify their communication method.
• Ironically, Stephen Jay Gould changed his mind gradually. When, if ever, do prominent biologists admit they’re wrong?
• Hint: read the comments on this one. Months after the “arsenic life” paper was roundly criticized in online fora, its authors respond in print.
• In case you missed it. Jesse Bering and Gordon Gallup respond to criticism, and do not improve their case. P.Z. concurred, and hectocotyli found still other faults.

The weather was lousy, but the coffee was excellent. Photo by andrewyang.

I spent most of my final spring break as a graduate student in Portland, Oregon, where I am not sure I saw direct sunlight even once. Who wants to get a tan over spring break, anyway? Regular posting resumes when I’m back in Moscow next week. If you “like” D&T on Facebook, you’ll get an alert about that right in your News Feed (TM). That’s a good thing, right?

• Not sure this’ll be practical in Portland. Solar power systems became both cheaper and more efficient in the last twenty years, and they’re likely to keep doing so.
• Not helping. If you’re HIV positive in Missouri, you can be prosecuted for “recklessly” transmitting HIV when you do things that don’t actually transmit HIV.
• Get out your “jump to conclusions” mats. Antidepressants seem to cause increased weight gain in lab rats—but that doesn’t mean they’ve caused the obesity epidemic.
• Take two mind games and call me in the morning. Even if you tell a patient the truth, prescribing a placebo can be ethically complicated.
• Sperm aren’t that tough to kill. A contraceptive pill for men is probably about five years away. In fact, it’s been about five years away for decades.
• Blood and rhetoric. The first attempts at blood transfusion were greeted with controversy that prefigured our modern debates over stem cells and genetic engineering.
• No blarney. Krystal D’Costa recounts how the Irish first came to the Caribbean as slaves.
• In case you missed it. Jon Wilkins bounces off the “adaptive homophobia” kerfuffle to explain more broadly why plausibility is not enough to test adaptive hypotheses. In related news, I got Phrayngulated.

Bat in flight. Photo by tarotastic.

Blah blah blah, Facebook, blah blah blah.

• When life gives you parasites … Ancient ammonoids—forerunners of modern squid and nautiluses, dealt with parasites by encasing them in pearl.
• Evolutionary baby pictures. Bats’ evolution from flightless ancestors, illustrated.
• Note to my students: no human testing planned yet. Enhancing the levels of a particular enzyme in rats’ brains helps them retain memories.
• Discredited more than a century ago, but you get to use a “cephalometer of Anthelme.” Want to make a living reading people’s personalities by the bumps on their head? Maybe phrenology is for you.
• Using foremost legs as antennae, even. Spider mimics ant surprisingly well.
• Sensory metaphor hijinks. People are more likely to identify an ambiguously-gendered face as female when touching something soft.
• Glass ceilings are durable. Active discrimination may not be preventing women from advancing in the sciences, but institutional biases sure are.
• Don’t panic. Panic Virus author Seth Mnookin understands the parental worries underlying vaccine denialism, but he still thinks it’s a problem.
• In case you missed it. Jesse Bering thinks homophobia might be adaptive. He’s wrong.

And now, after a string of weeks without video in my Friday roundup, I give you a slow loris with a tiny umbrella.