Photo by mjsmith01.

• This week, at The Molecular Ecologist: I reviewed Craig Venter’s new book.
• And, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Stressful conditions make mutualism stronger.
• Now available for free. An award-winning report on fracking.
• The “gore king.” A new species of tyrannosaur sounds like a character in “Game of Thrones.”
• In, of all places, the abortion debate. How Nazi-era anatomy work haunts us to this day.
• Listen up! Oyster larvae identify good places to put down roots based on sound.
• Too good to be true is still too good to be true. In this case, meaning $10,000 college degrees.
• Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a venture capitalist. A new X-prize seeks prototypes for a medical tricorder.
• Depends what you mean by “life.” Is there life after graduate school?
• Love everlasting. The oldest-known fossils of insects in copula.

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Christ, what an asshole. Photo by K Schneider.

• This week at The Molecular Ecologist: An interview with Ruth Shaw.
• Humans are actually pretty monogamous? That’s what a comparison of Y-chromosomes and paternal names suggests.
• Advice for grad students. Mostly, take care of yourself.
• Which spent 100 times as long in review as the original. A rebuttal of bad science on genetic prediction of autism.
• Meanwhile. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is getting more ambitious.
• Glibness isn’t a victimless crime? In which Malcolm Gladwell’s loose hand on the facts isn’t doing any good for people with dyslexia.
• Your semi-annual reminder. Cute animals aren’t really very cute to each other.
• Plus ça change. Even as human geneticists are beginning to realize genetics is a lot messier than they thought, and there are good reasons to think that mathematical ability is more in your confidence than your genes, the developer of the Ion Torrent sequencing system is about to drop about a million bucks on a study of mathematicians’ genetics.
• And in other long-shot projects: Should we send a DNA sequencer to Mars?

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Rhubarb. Delicious but toxic. Photo by Heather Quintal.

• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Lizards that adjust their development for their habitat based on the temperature outside their eggs.
• You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hopefully learn a little about harassment and how to stop it. Hope Jahren sure can write.
• Color me not surprised, still unhappy to see it. There’s a gender gap in citation counts.
• Plants versus everyone else. The not-so-hidden chemical warfare agents of the vegetable aisle.
• “Use the left lane for passing, Mr. Sulu.” What an Alcubierre warp-drive spacecraft would look like on its way past.
• Hmm. Should peer reviewers review methods even before the experiments are done?
• Welcome to the hominid family! On that new, impressively complete skull of an early Homo species.
• Bookmarking for (hopefully not too much) later. How life as a professor isn’t like anything you’ve done before.

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Photo by jby.

So this week, these things happened: Biologist and Scientific American blogger Danielle N. Lee called out a deeply disrespectful editor at the website Biology-Online, only to have SciAm take down her post. In response to widespread outrage and agitation, SciAm‘s editor-in-chief relented and more-or-less apologized.

And then Monica Byrne and Hannah Waters came forward to report that Bora Zivkovic—the SciAm blogs editor, co-founder of the ScienceOnline conference, series editor of the Open Lab anthology, and all-around godfather of online science communication—had sexually harassed them. Bora’s confirmed Monica Byrne’s report, apologized, resigned from the board of ScienceOnline, and is apparently taking leave from SciAm.

Not a good week for some leading institutions of science outreach—but also, one hopes, the first steps toward doing better.

Also these things:

• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! How circumcision changes the microbial ecology of the penis.
• And at The Molecular Ecologist Modeling genetic drift in phenotypic evolution.
• Meeting the press. The Queer in STEM study was covered in Bitch Magazine and The Minnesota Daily
• But what will the delays cost? The U.S. Federal Government is finally open for business again, including the science–related bits.
• Interesting. Estimates of the genetic contribution to intelligence are significantly affected by cultural context.
• More like a shuffling, undead buffet. The zombie apocalypse wouldn’t be so apocalyptic for the animal kingdom.
• Because indoor lighting is … too dim? Myopia is on the rise, and it’s probably because kids are spending too much time indoors.
• Best reading between the lines ever. That time an invertebrate biologist extracted a worm from his own cheek and published it as a case study.
• Worst side-effect of time in orbit you’ve never heard about. Spacesuit gloves are horrible for fingernails.
• Wow. Genome-wide search-and-replace.

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Another victim of the shutdown. Photo by Minette Layne.

• This week at The Molecular Ecologist Is the ultimate model organism for molecular genetics Homo sapiens?
• This week in shutdown science: The CDC sits out an outbreak of drug-resistant salmonella, experiments on hold, lab mice euthanized and an entire season of Antarctic research cancelled.
• Not like they have much state funding to lose, these days. Public universities are looking for ways to be less, um, public.
• Of course, it can be both! Is behavioral genetics “taboo,” or just bad science?
• From the personal to the general. The New York Times Magazine goes in-depth on underrepresentation of women in science.
• Because bunnies! The Central Limit Theorem turns out to be adorable.
• This sounds … familiar. The Great Library of Alexandria wasn’t destroyed by a fire, but by budget cuts.
• Literally, because he says he can’t. Why Malcolm Gladwell can’t be trusted.
• About 35 years. A new study estimates how long global warming can continue before average temperatures exceed historical highs.
• It’s more likely to be MRSA. No, that’s almost certainly not a brown recluse bite.

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