Photo by jo3design.

• This week, at the Molecular Ecologist. How to make heatmaps in R.
• Today in unsurprising bad news. The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the most urgent one yet.
• Privilege, with extra pepperoni. Or, yet another iteration of, “Don’t be a dick”.
• Doggone it. Word from further up the tenure track is, it doesn’t get any easier.
• For $12 an hour, it could be worse. The personal experience of an undergrad research participant.
• Brain waves, and more than brain waves. The ongoing quest to decide what counts as “consciousness”.
• Conspecifics are the worst. The eggs of one parasitic bird species may look like its host eggs so as to hide from other parasitic birds.
• Virtuous cycles are tricky. Does exercise make you sleepy, or does sleep help you exercise?

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Photo by Shaun Bascara.

• This week at the Molecular Ecologist: When domesticated gene variants go back to nature.
• In mice. New study suggests that sugar reduces female lifespan and male fertility.
• “Better” depends on what your collaborators use, too. How to pick the right tool for the scientific job.
• From the British Ecological Society. A nice, thorough guide to peer review.
• Sure, why the hell not? Could hypothetical life on Saturn’s moon Titan take the form of giant methane-eating cells?
• Ugh. The groundbreaking long-term Framingham Heart Survey is looking down the barrel of crippling budget cuts.

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Twenty-six percent longer, you say? Photo by Rich Anderson.

• The Ecological Society of America met in my front yard this week. And there was coverage at Dynamic Ecology and the EEB & Flow, and of course all over Twitter.
• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! I put the “Don’t Sleep with Mean People” spat to rest.
• And at the Molecular Ecologist: The care and feeding (and protection) of great big genetic datasets.
• Think I’ll just have the black bean burger. Lab-grown hamburger gets its first taste test.
• Apart from “because it’d be cool.” Why you should, or shouldn’t, have your genome sequenced.
• Prepare to start scratching. When you watch this video of a mosquito bite from the inside.
• In armadillos, naturally. An in-depth study of the structural changes associated with erection of the penis.
• Establishment matters. What invasive species can teach us about climate-change-induced range shifts.
• For fish, anyway. Fish raised in stimulating environments are smarter.

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Photo by Pierre-Yves Babelon.

• Okay, now this is bad. Humans’ supply of chocolate is in trouble because of bug-tending ants.
• A history of modern lawns, and the alternatives.
• And with a funding cut. House Republicans unilaterally decide that NASA should ditch its asteroid-capture plans in favor of a moon base.
• Because mutation happens during mitosis, too. When it comes to genotypes, we each contain multitudes.
• Not good! The feedback between climate change and wildfires.
• It’s about deciding. And also not deciding. On starting up a lab.
• Good news. The next weapon against one group of drug-resistant bacteria might be a fungicide.

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Lose the best pollinator, and the others are less effective. Photo by jby.

• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! The search for the missing human boner bone. And Yoder v. Brinkman, Round Two.
• And meanwhile … The Queer in STEM study is wrapping up sampling next week!
• Which is no good for effective, um, pollination. Loss of the most common pollinator in a meadow means the others are less loyal to individual flower species.
• But will they make it so? NASA’s shoestring side project in faster-than-light travel.
• What worked once, worked once. How to stop worrying and love the tenure track; and a dose of perspective on this kind of advice.
• Re-writing history or making it better? Alan Turing may finally get a posthumous pardon for an “indeceny” conviction that carried a sentence of chemical castration … but is that really the right thing to do?
• A quarter of the price, for a 76% failure rate? Massively open online courses aren’t working out so well for college students.
• Use gloves, folks. On the dangers of becoming allergic to the things you study.

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Sure, it’s not good for you, but is sugar toxic? Photo by howzey.

• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! A guest post calls for escalation in the “arms race” against aggressive mimics in scholarly publishing. And I picked a fight with a Canadian nerd-rapper.
• Which is more relentless? A new study projects climate change will happen way too fast for vertebrate animals to adapt; but see my take at The Molecular Ecologist.
• In evolution, and in scientific thought. Reflections on the importance of founder effects.
• Satisfying the grasshopper and the ant? Cities that plan to prevent—and mitigate—climate change reap short-term benefits, too.
• Depends what you mean by “toxin,” of course. Is it appropriate to call sugar a toxin?
• For future reference. The WEIRDness of evolutionary psychology, quantified.
• I mean, really. Preferring non-science over science for aesthetic reasons is just kind of embarrassing.
• Let me get back to you on that. Does the self-correcting paradigm of science move too slowly?
• Vicious cycle. If you lose sleep because you’re worried about something, sleep deprivation will make the axiety worse.
• Men can still wear whatever they were wearing when they rolled out of bed. How women can dress for success in academia.
• And it’s not getting better. Handgun safety is a public health problem.
• Proof-of-concept, anyway. Silencing an entire extra chromosome to cure Down’s Syndrome.

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