This one is for PZ. Photo by Joachim S. Müller.

I spent my week readying another (!) manuscript for submission and doing large volumes of PCR. And, yes, surfing the web between thermal cycler loads. But! I read about science, so that’s mostly OK.

• What we have here is a failure to communicate. With their complex nervous systems and surprising intelligence, octopuses ought to be as sensitive to pain as mammals—but there’s surprisingly little evidence to address that question. (NeuroDojo)
• Where are all the men? Analysis of DNA from thousand-year-old “moa graveyards” in New Zealand finds female skeletons overwhelmingly outnumbering males. (Laelaps via @nerdychristie)
• You can only preserve what you can get. Land protection efforts by NGOs fall short of established habitat protection goals, a case study in Maine finds. (Conservation Maven)
• How long we have left is in-DEET-terminate. Laboratory selection experiments demonstrate that mosquitoes may be evolving resistance to the insect über-repellent. (Wired Science)
• It only took 41 years longer than we needed to put a man on the moon. A Florida horticulture professor has bred what could be the first good-tasting mass-producible tomato. (The Washington Post)
• We’re all Neanderthals now. Analysis of the first complete Neanderthal genome suggests that they interbred with modern humans. (Special feature in Science, NPR, John Hawks Weblog)

And for those of you who didn’t recognize the three-letter acronym in my introductory paragraph, this is what PCR does:

Every little bit helps. Photo by jby.

Here’s what caught my eye when I finally picked up the old RSS feeds this week.

• I will not call this a “fish story.” While overfishing is (un)naturally selecting most species for smaller body size, tournament marlins (which are only fished for sport) have gotten bigger over the last fifty years. (Southern Fried Science
• Not a neutral question. The number of species in a community may determine whether the makeup of that community is more due to chance, or the competitive ability of its members. (The EEB & flow)
• You can always do better than nothing. Just a single tree in the middle of an agricultural field can boost the diversity of birds and bats found in the area. (Conservation Maven)
• Well, it is an earthworm. Scientists at my own University of Idaho have captured specimens of the Palouse Giant Earthworm, which hasn’t been seen since 2005. It turns out to be somewhat less than giant. (NPR)
• Maybe they’re allergic? Elephants warn each other away from bees. (The Thoughtful Animal)
• Future work to be funded by Best Buy. Octopuses aren’t fooled by video images at old-fashioned resolution, but respond to HDTV images as though they were real. (Observations of a Nerd)

And finally, via The Other 95%, a praying mantis encounters a hummingbird.

Now this is a radical feminist. Photo by J.N. Stuart.

• Males replaced by an extra round of DNA replication: Female whiptail lizards can lay fertile eggs without the help of a male because they start egg formation with extra copies of their chromosomes. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)
• Pathogens. It’s always pathogens: In his inaugural article as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Robert Rickleffs proposes that coevoluiton with pathogens explains most of the diversity of life on Earth. (Coevolvers)
• Evolutionary conservation biology? To conserve the diversity of life, we need to know how it evolved in the first place, and how it might evolve in the future. (The EEB & flow)
• Plant vs. plant: The spread of one invasive plant can be checked by creating barriers of native plants. (Conservation Maven)
• You mean it’s not just to make winter that much more miserable? Flu cases may peak in winter months because drier air transmits the flu virus more effectively. (Influenza A (H1N1) Blog)
• Unintended consequences: Fifty years of selecting foxes at a fur farm for their tameness also changed the shape of their ears and tails. (The Thoughtful Animal)
• The virus only has to get lucky once: Even as we find new ways to attack HIV, the virus keeps mutating; which is why the “cocktails” of drugs taken by HIV patients must target many different viral proteins. (The Daily Monthly)
• We all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place: Mammals that live most of their lives up in the trees tend to live longer than similar-sized mammals that live on the dangerous, dangerous ground. (New Scientist, Gene Expression)

Chad Orzel, over at Uncertain Principles, is giving up blogs (reading, not writing, anyway) for Lent. He has a good point w/r/t the echoic effects of political blogs and political-ish posting on science blogs* – it’s tempting to follow suit, if only for the blood-pressure benefits. Fortunately, there’s also plenty of online writing about new knowledge, and that’s what I aggregate on Fridays:

Gesundheit. Photo by erikogan.

• Collecting whale snot: It is, improbably, even more complicated than it sounds. (The Thoughtful Animal)
• We have seen the population bomb, and it is us: The solution to unsustainable birthrates in developing countries is to develop them, right? Maybe not: while birthrates decline as development improves, highly developed countries often see their birthrates increase. (Tomorrow’s Table)
• Yes, there’s a blog dedicated to spirochetes now: The bacterium that causes Lyme disease takes days to move from the gut of a newly-infected tick to the salivary glands, apparently because it stops moving when it hits the gut. (Spirochetes Unwound)
• So far, no saber-toothed dentures found: Analysis of a large sample of broken fossil teeth of Smilodon fatalis suggest that saber-toothed cats frequently resorted to chewing on bones. (Laelaps)
• Who doesn’t already do this? Seriously: Scientists should report p-values, rather than just calling results “significant.” (i’m a chordata! urochordata!)
• Well, that’s unexpected: Bacteria growing in the fungus gardens cultivated by leafcutter ants are capable of nitrogen fixation. (Laura’s Animals/Wildlife Blog)
• Your (great-to-the-nth-grand) mother was a crab: A new reconstruction of the arthropod evolutionary tree, employing 62 nuclear genes, suggests that the common ancestor of insects was a crustacean. (Palaeoblog)
• Malaria and degenerative bone disease: Extensive analysis of Tutankhamen’s mummy (and others) suggests that it was not, in fact, all that good to be the Pharaoh. (NPR, NY Times)
• Here be dragons: Teeny-tiny, adorable dragons. (SciencePunk)
• OK, this is a little bit political: The Obama stimulus package was pretty good for NSF-funded researchers. (dechronization

*Why, yes, I’m currently re-reading David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster. Why do you ask?

The new month sees Dave Munger launching his new project, The Daily Monthly, which will feature daily posts on a new topic each month. The effect is like a long-form magazine article released in serial form. The inaugural topic, AIDS in America, is already really interesting. Meanwhile, ocean blogger Miriam Goldstein has closed shop at the Oyster’s Garter to join Deep Sea News. In actual science news:

Photo by auntie rain.

• No surprise here: fragmented forest makes poor panda habitat. (The Voltage Gate)
• Close observation of decaying fish (ugh!) shows that the traits most useful for reconstructing evolutionary relationships might be the ones least likely to fossilize. (dechonrization)
• Protecting ecosystems may not always mean not manipulating them. (The EEB & flow)
• Alligators pump air through their lungs in a one-way flow – just like birds. (The Reptipage)
• How do you figure out how ants navigate? Put them on teeny-tiny stilts. (The Thoughtful Animal)
• British medical journal The Lancet finally gets around to retracting a flawed, twelve-year-old study that suggested a link between vaccination and autism. (The retraction statement is free online, with registration. News coverage is ubiquitous, but Michael Specter is in the running for most coldly furious about the whole debacle.)
• Freshwater eels appear to have evolved from ancestors that lived in the deep sea. (Deep Sea News)

Photos by Thomas Hawk and Tolka Rover.

Whether you’re doing it underwater or in the air, echolocation apparently requires the same kind of adaptation. New Scientist reports that parallel evolutionary changes to the same gene allow both dolphins and bats to hear the high-frequency sounds they use for sonar. In other online science news:

• Eutrophication of lakes reduces the diversity of invertebrate species they support. (Conservation Maven)
• Real-time video of viruses spreading among host cells. Seriously. (Ed Yong’s twitter feed)
• A long-term survey of bird species diversity finds that sites on an active military base look pretty much like sites that see less, um, artillery. (Conservation Maven, again)
• Close examination of fossilized feathers provides the first evidence for striped dinosaurs. (Carl Zimmer for the New York Times, Not Exactly Rocket Science, NPR)
• The human foot absorbs the stress of running more effectively when not encased in a supportive sneaker. (NPR)

Wednesday saw Greta and Dave Munger turn off the virtual lights at Cognitive Daily after five years of high-quality, and often participatory, science writing. No other science blog that I know regularly asked its readers to join studies, however informal, of the very concepts it covered – not just writing about science, but practicing it. It’s sad to see it end, but I’m looking forward to the new project Dave teases at the end of the announcement. Elsewhere in the science blogosphere:

Photo by Gary Simmons.

• Europe’s fisheries aren’t likely to recover by 2015, as planned under a 2002 treaty. (Conservation Bytes)
• The American Naturalist will begin requiring authors to deposit all data, not just genetic sequences or phylogenetic trees, in publicly-accessible online repositories. (skeetersays)
• Shorebirds may migrate in part because there are fewer nest predators at higher latitudes. (Living the Scientific Life)
• Natural selection imposed on native species by invasive species might make prairie grass communities better able to resist new invasions. (Conservation Maven)
• Lemurs might have colonized Madagascar by rafting on driftwood – a new model of ocean currents shows that it might have been easier than previously thought. (Laelaps)

Photo by Kevin Steele.

Yes, I’m presently at Science Online 2010, but there’s no rest for the Interwebs.

• Kill your TV, before it kills you: Watching more than an hour of television a day may counteract the benefits of regular exercise. (Dave Munger at SEED)
• Divorce rates are higher in states with same-sex marriage bans. Correlation, or causation? “It could be that voters who have more marital problems of their own are more inclined to deny the right of marriage to same-sex couples.” (FiveThirtyEight.com)
• Artificial selection of food plants doesn’t reduce their genetic diversity, it turns out. (Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog)
• Prairie dogs help prevent invasive plants from invading. (Conservation Magazine)
• Circumcision changes the bacterial community of the penis – and reduces the presence of species that can cause bacterial vaginosis. (Mike the Mad Biologist)
• The evolution of avian influenza depends more on local dynamics than on long-distance migration events. (Mystery Rays from Outer Space)
• Farmed salmon released in Scotland swim for Norway. (Conservation Maven)
• In Fiji, tilapia escaped from fish farms are probably preying on native fish. (Observations of a Nerd)

And, finally, via kottke, beautiful footage paired with unsettling statistics.

Gray crowned rosy-finch. Photo by jroldenettel.

• Bayesian methods for reconstructing evolutionary relationships between species may be susceptible to errors created by long branch attraction – one of the problems they were supposed to solve. (dechronization)
• When introduced trout compete for food with gray-crowned rosy-finches, the rosyfinches lose. (Conservation Maven)
• The success of an invasive plant depends on the kind of habitat it’s invading, and how that habitat is managed by humans. (The EEB & flow)
• New fossils are the earliest-known vertebrate footprints on land – 395 million years old. (Not Exactly Rocket Science, Laelaps, Pharyngula, and Palaeoblog)
• Give a meteorologist a green screen, and he’ll tell you tomorrow’s forecast. Give a meteorologist professional certification, and he’ll tell you that climate change is a hoax. (Columbia Journalism Review)