Nap time. Photo by bhermans.

• A few CCs of prevention. Antiretroviral treatment is 96 percent effective at preventing HIV transmission between partners.
• Humans as part of our own environment. Stopping the extinction crisis we’re causing may require a new perspective.
• Another reason not to put your phone inside a hive. Cell phone signals may be bad for bees.
• As with all fitness measures, it depends on ecological context. Is there an evolutionary advantage to being right?
• Kill your alarm clock. Compared to the rest of the world, WEIRD* people have weird sleep habits, too.
• Feeding like a whale, millions of years before whales. The toothless ichthyosaur Shastasaurus probably sucked small prey into its mouth.

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* Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic

Touching. Photo by WTL Photos.

• Phrase of the week: “mental hangover.” Migraines are mysterious, but we understand even less about their aftermath, the postdrome.
• Sorry, Mom. Why do sons cost their mothers more than daughters, and how do those costs manifest?
• With a bingo card for educational fun! A comprehensive guide to debunking bullshit evolutionary psychology.
• Just like getting into Carnegie Hall. Blind people have more sensitive fingertips, but sighted people can make up the difference with practice.
• Avast! Branding strategies were employed by pirates, and by those who didn’t care for them.
• This is all your fault, game theory. The Rapture may not make theological, scientific, or logical sense—but it may have a basis in game theory.

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Finished! Photo via Boston Public Library.

Graduatin’ tomorrow, movin’ east next week. It’s as though I’ve come to the end of some sort of long, strenuous, athletic activity …

• Because it’s there? Dave Munger wonders why anyone would run a marathon.
• Convergent evolution—in two different directions. The extinct marsupial predators known as thylacines may have had dog-like skulls, but their elbows suggest they hunted like cats.
• Where frequency meets ill-preparedness. The regions where a particular kind of natural disaster causes the most damage are not always the regions where it occurs most often.
• All the fun of opinion polling, with nasal swabs. Recruiting participants for even a small epidemiological study is logistically tricky.
• After olives, the goddess Athena invented wheat-free ambrosia. The history of gluten-related health issues stretches from ancient Greece to your neighborhood Whole Foods.
• Fossilized. Raindrops. It may be possible to reconstruct the density of the ancient atmosphere by measuring fossilized raindrops.
• Next up, Am Nat? The ecology journal Oikos recently launched a blog featuring “armchair ecology” on topics from the value of (judicious) hand-waving arguments to lichinivorous moths.

Video of the week, from the BBC: a time-lapse simulation of fetal face formation. Watch as ontogeny (kinda, sorta, okay not really) recapitulates phylogeny.

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A periodical cicada from brood XII. Photo by JanetandPhil (Correction, 2 June 2011: replaced photo by James Jordan, which depicted the wrong cicada species).

• Still not as fast as on CSI. The lab work for genetic identification of, say, that terrorist mastermind you just killed, goes quicker than you might expect.
• Not named Uroptychus pinnochio because that name is taken already. A newly discovered lobster is distinguished by its prominent rostrum.
• Time to reinstate the noon-time martini. Is lunch in danger of extinction thanks to social anxieties?
• The case of the missing (bird) baby boom. You’d think that the emergence of huge swarms of periodic cicadas would be a boon for bird populations—but you’d be wrong.
• Born that way. “Lesbian” lizards (of the sort discussed here) have been bred in the lab from sexual parents.
• Maybe these were better bird food than cicadas? A two-inch long fossilized ant has been unearthed in Wyoming.

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It’s not easy being green. Photo by Twin Peaks.

Today’s save the frogs day—donate, cut your pesticide use, build a backyard pond, or maybe help an amorous amphibian cross the road.

• Two (thousand) drifters, off to see the world/ there’s such a lot of world to see … Fire ants cross bodies of water by forming themselves into a raft.
• Worse than fashion mags. Seriously. Want to give your teenager body image issues? Subscribe to a fitness magazine.
• Orchids will do anything for pollination. An orchid’s brown-spotted leaves and rotten odor convince flies that the flower is dying from a fungal infection, so they’ll pick up pollen while trying to feed on the fake decay.
• Babies are smarter than we thought. A classical developmental psychology test turns out not to document a bug in the way human infants think about the world, but a feature of social learning.
• Harm reduced. The city of Vancouver has dramatically reduced overdose death rates by opening Insite, a facility that allows addicts to use drugs under medical supervision.
• Cephalopod: A Space Odyssey. NASA will send squids into space on the final flight of the shuttle Endeavour.
• Introspection with your natural history. Brian Switek muses on the future of science writing.

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