Leave the chocolate milk. Take the espresso. Photo by confusedbee.

• So counterintuitive, it’s counterfactual. The “chocolate milk diet” thoroughly and painstakingly debunked.
• Proof that baby crows are smarter than the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. A cool new study documents the development of object permanence in crows.
• First step: piss off Richard Owen. How the giant squid was finally accepted as non-mythical.
• Maybe it ain’t so, Stephen Jay. Was the mismeasuring of mismeasurement in Gould’s Mismeasure of Man itself … incorrectly assessed?
• Gray’s position did not make leaps. How Charles Darwin slowly convinced the botanist Asa Gray to ditch creationism, though not Christianity, simply by asking him questions.
• Paging Dr. Pangloss. A clever, but almost entirely untested, hypothesis proposes that our fingers wrinkle up when wet to improve our grip.
• Hope you like pasta. Over at his shiny new blog Science-Based Running, Dave Munger reassesses carb loading.
• In case you missed it. D&T closed out Pride Month by hosting the Diversity in Science blog carnival.
• Go do this right now. Pitch in a few bucks to help Sarcozona attend ESA, so she can write up the international ecology conference.

A rough-skinned newt. Photo by matt knoth.

Don’t forget—Diversity in Science carnival contributions are due Monday!

• I missed this year’s Evolution Meetings in Norman, Oklahoma—but they were the best-Tweeted iteration of the conference yet.
• I’ll have mine scrambled, with the nightshade salad on the side. From those very same meetings, Carl Zimmer reports that neurotoxic newts lay poisonous eggs, too.
• Back off, Kevin Bacon. There’s good evidence that humans have magnetic sensors in our eyes—but can we use them?
• Zombie ladybug bodyguard. A parasitoid wasp preys on ladybugs, then induces them to protect its caterpillar, not unlike Cotesia glomerata.
• The clone that grows together… Artificial selection can induce single-celled yeast to evolve multicellularity.
• Coming out of the dungeon. Scicurious and Krystal D’Costa exchange thoughts on geeks’ place in contemporary culture.
• Not given lightly. When, and when not, to give someone post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV.
• In case you missed it. I snuck an explanation of mutation-selection-drift balance into a big gay blog post; PZ Myers pointed out some things I missed.

And finally, a video sent to me by Dave Giordano, describing field studies of nesting behavior in tropical birds.

Whitetail deer: adorable forces of ecological destruction. Photo by HerpShots.

There’s just a few days left to submit your posts for the Pride Month 2011 edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival.

• But how will we identify vampires now? A new artificial heart design is simpler than other models, pumping blood without creating a pulse.
• Schadenfreude. The production company responsible for the anti-science hack film “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” has gone bankrupt.
• So we’ll have those sharks any day now, right? Living cells engineered to produce green fluorescent protein become the first-ever biological lasers.
• Not mentioned: liberals more likely to accept lousy pay. Why academia might, in fact, have a liberal bias.
• In some cases, yes. Are invasive species as bad as we’ve been led to believe?
• Say it ain’t so, Stephen Jay. To demonstrate that a historic (and racist) study of human skull size was biased by systematic manipulation of data, Stephen Jay Gould systematically manipulated data.
• Save a serviceberry bush—eat venison! A multi-decade experiment provides strong evidence that too many deer are bad for forests.
• Not by running with scissors. How the cave-dwelling isopod lost its eyes

There’s a reason you have to make small talk with your barber. Photo by Dave Fayram.

If you’re gay, lesbian, bi, trans, or straight and supportive, and you have an even slightly science-related blog, why haven’t you submitted a post for the Diversity in Science Carnival? Go, do it now—you can read these great science articles afterward.

• Literal nitpicking. Language may have originally evolved so we could gossip while we groomed each other.
• You get a niche, and you get a niche … Experimental evidence that variable environments support more species.
• Not so super, really. When someone already infected with HIV becomes infected by a second strain of the virus, it’s a superinfection.
• Only seven papers, but six are in Sc’Nature. Ed Yong profiles the man who solved the 3-D structure of DNA and invented “culturomics.”
• Apt. The functions of the facial nerve, illustrated only with pictures of facial expressions.
• Smarts win, except in Australia. Amphibian species with bigger brains tend to be better at invading new habitats.
• Me, I’m in it for the lab coat.* Why it’s cool to be a scientist

—————
* I do not, in fact, wear a lab coat.

Picturesque, but maybe not practical. Photo by jimw.

• Arsenic Life II: The Response-ening. Rosie Redfield responds to responses to her criticism of the “arsenic life” study, and considers how she’d go about testing the original claims; Carl Zimmer discusses how online criticisms like Redfield’s may have changed the way we review scientific results. And the original paper appears in print (alongside critical responses) for the first time this week.
• It’s a simple question of weight ratios. A transportation engineer explains why airships will probably never be widely used.
• The bright side is you get to write another review, right? The trouble with writing about the ethics of an emerging technology is that the state of the art changes very quickly.
• Life’s building blocks aren’t usually re-used to make models of the starship Enterprise. Biological systems’ use of a relatively small set of widely-available building blocks means that life is like LEGO.
• History matters. German towns that had anti-Jewish pogroms in 1349 were more likely to have pogroms in the 1920s.
• ‘Bout time. In the face of ongoing opposition, climate scientists are using stronger language to discuss global warming.
• She’s crossing the streams! Jen McCreight brings science blogging to Savage Love to address the mystery of the G-spot.
• Wait till you find out what works best. The next breakthrough in mosquito repellant might work by overwhelming the bloodsuckers’ antennae.

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