Is it getting crowded in here? Photo by James Cridland.

• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! The evolutionary compromise made by attractive flowers.
• And, at The Molecular Ecologist: I mused about how science depends on what scientists notice.
• Actually a pretty tidy solution. Ant larvae are completely constipated.
• Woah. Has NASA captured images of water flowing on Mars?
• Turning somersaults to remain inside the cave. The mental gymnastics of creationism.
• Drosophila-philiac. A history of the fruit fly as a model organism.
• Maybe not scary? No, that’s still a lot of people. Some fresh projections for world population growth—and a great in-depth report on the successful history of family planning in, of all places, Iran.
• Where to even start? Fighting the good fight for science literacy online.
• Hmm. Why don’t we have any numbers on the usefulness (or lack thereof) of online classes for minority students?
• Because they’re designed to! When statistics make caricatures.
• Superb. The endosymbiosis at the origin of eukaryotic life.
• Step aside, Tyrannosaurus. Some fossil mammals that are just as cool as dinosaurs.

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There’s probably at least one class-M planet somewhere in this picture. Photo by redeye^.

• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Stalking the wild holobiont.
• And at The Molecular Ecologist: How to “triangulate” your genome scan.
• The fault is not in the stars, but in our telescopes. Will we ever find Earth-like planets orbiting other stars?
• Wow. With winter precipitation at a record low, California is facing the third year of a catastrophic drought.
• It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a scientist in possession of a hypothesis must be in want of Jane Austen. Jonathan Eisen takes issue with some literary advice for scientists.
• A review of The Signal and the Noise. Why scientists need prior knowledge.
• Yeah … probably not. Is this comparative karyotype the final piece of evidence that will shut down creationism?
• In memoriam, Philip Seymour Hoffman. The science of addiction, in very personal perspective.
• Wow. How a photographer caught a bee mid-sting.
• The flaw in their thinking is the implicit assumption that a cat is a rigid body, an assumption that is obviously false to any cat-owner! The physics that lets cats land on their feet.

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Will the future have monarch butterflies? Photo by Minette Layne.

• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Does debating creationists do any good?
• And at The Molecular Ecologist: Watching drug resistance sweep through the population of HIV in an infected patient.
• Sure, why the hell not? Does it make sense to assign literature in a biology class?
• Cool! DNA from a 1500-year-old strain of black plague.
• Evolved to chill out. How anoles deal with cold weather.
• Same subspecies, even! Two populations of the same rattlesnake species, two totally different venoms.
• Mercy meets practicality? Interviews with the survivors of murder victims suggests that the death penalty doesn’t give them more closure.
• More musing on #MyGenderGap What should we do about the gender ratio in our collaborations?
• We live in the future, part i: Clever fluorescent tagging visualizes the molecular basis of memory formation.
• We live in the future, part ii: Using engineered fruit flies to diagnose cancer.
• Not good. Migratory populations of monarch butterflies are smaller than they’ve ever been.

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Much data. Photo by Minette Layne.

• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Should women have to give up family life to build a career in science?
• And, at The Molecular Ecologist: Pleuni Pennings talks about her path to scientific research.
• Pettiness personified. Some inconsequential editor outs Dr. Isis, gets roundly roundly rebuffed.
• No, really, don’t. If you absolutely must kill an arthropod, you can probably do it more safely than by blowing up your house.
• Shiny! Tagging X chromosomes with different fluorescent markers reveals mosaics of parental influence.
• Wow. Many cow. So not Trivers-Willard. Records from almost 1.5 million animals demonstrate that, on average, cows make more milk for daughters.
• Hmm. Application of fungicide and insecticide to swaths of rainforest suggest that pathogenic fungi, but not insect herbivores drive total plant community diversity.
• CSI: Cretaceous. Piecing together how dinosaurs fought.

And, because I’ve just wrapped up another round of Citizen Science (well, except for the grading), a little advice for some of my “undeclared” students, via io9:

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Photo by jby.

• Ugh, ick, and blargh. Charter schools are turning out to be a great way to get taxpayers to fund your Creationist pseudoscience classes.
• Silly old bear! Winnie the Pooh, diagnosed.
• They help … if you tell patients they help. On the medical uses—or lack thereof—for the placebo effect.
• On what counts in doing science. That is, experience, rather than genius.
• Eek. Why are academics so vulnerable to online outrage?
• Onward and upward! Even as they get bigger, trees just keep growing.
• “I try hard to avoid having principles because they inevitably lead me to hypocrisy, and aside from that, very little else is accomplished.” Why Hope Jahren won’t be interviewed in Nature.

And, this week, a video (via Kyle Hill): how to get leaf-cutter ants to carry a sign. No, you don’t need to unionize them first.

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Photo by Doug McAbee.

• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Cave fish in an evolutionary canal?
• Queer in STEM: Covered in a very nice article in this week’s issue of Nature.
• Yum? Pikas are dealing with a warming climate by eating more moss.
• I’m getting a tickle in the back of my throat just reading this. Growing up without vaccines.
• With the second-best headline of the week. The cellular basis of blue petunias.
• This week in evolving E. coli. The surprisingly simple genetics of an experimental evolutionary change.
• Personal, maddening. What happened when a Hawaiian city councilman decided to learn the facts on genetically modified crops.
• Also, why I don’t think I want to ever go to south Florida. How biologists decide which introduced species are the scariest.

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“No, I don’t want a breath mint.” Photo by TexasEagle.

• This week, at The Molecular Ecologist: I discuss why different genetic tests might give different disease risk estimates.
• Congrats! To the authors of articles selected for Open Lab 2013.
• Dolphin, not shark. How to tell the difference between “gray things with dorsal fins in the ocean.”
• “Defensive halitosis.” Tobacco-eating caterpillars exude a toxic fog of nicotine to ward off predators.
• “A recipe for civilizational disaster.” The trouble with TED.
• About 7% funded, with the median P.I. about 10 years post-Ph.D. The depressing, depressing summary statistics from NSF grant funding in 2013.
• Surprise! National stereotypes don’t pan out in formal personality testing.

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Photo by jby.

• Sure, why the hell not? Is the next frontier in human psychiatric genetics the genetic variation within a single brain?
• But no one knows why they look like that. Weird, tiny silken towers turn out to be spider nurseries.
• Eek. Not-very-regulated dietary supplements can lead to serious liver damage.
• Guess my horse has left the barn on this one. Time for online academics to run for the pseudonyms?
• Plus one very important Golden Rule. Richard Lenski’s Ten Commandments of statistical inference.
• Unless you’re not into that anymore. The linguistic research behind that U.S. dialect map.

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Photo by The Tedster.

• This week at The Molecular Ecologist: How realistic are the non-overlapping generations assumed by lots of ecological models? And doing population genomics without a reference genome.
• Inflatable moth-butt feather dusters. They’re not genitalia—but they’re just as important.
• Cryptic variation put to adaptive use. Or, how Mexican cave fish went blind.
• Data science. It’s about the science, first.
• Yay! The FDA cracks down on antimicrobial consumer products in hopes of slowing the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
• Requiescat. The space robots lost in 2013.
• I think yes. Can we make grad school better by training fewer grad students?
• Including the excellent Kate Clancy! Nature picks ten people who mattered this year.
• Ancient DNA sequencing means even a piece of toe-bone contains Us Pleistocene. The new reconstruction of hanky-panky among ancient human species.

And finally, a video I may very well use in class a few weeks from now: some thoughts on how to read science news.

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No big deal for some animals? Photo by Will Clayton.

• This week, at The Molecular Ecologist: An interview with Richard Lenski.
• And, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Should peer review be more subjective?
• Everyone’s all, “why do we need to fund ant taxonomy?” until they’re covered in ants. What that story about “crazy ants” tells us about U.S. science funding.
• Drat. Bone marrow transplants have failed to clear two patients’ HIV infections.
• Also on searches for “is my husband gay”? A new estimate for the size of the U.S. gay population is based on Google searches for porn.
• Deal with it. You are, in fact, the sum of physical things happening inside your own skull.
• Really depends what you mean by “age.” Are there such things as living things that don’t age?
• Vaccinate, please. Measles cases in the U.S. tripled in 2013.
• Not sure I’d call it “scary” so much as “sobering.” The story of Easter Island may be both an ecological disaster and an exemplar of human resilience.
• Data for the masses, but what about interpretation? A geneticist on the case of the FDA versus 23andMe.
• Better than nothing? The FDA finally kinda, sorta moves to restrict agricultural antibiotic use.
• “… it was like an addiction.” How scientists make the transition from lab work to programming.

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