Dude, if you don’t brew it in your gut, you can’t really appreciate the bouquet. Photo by Lindsey Gira.

• This week at The Molecular Ecologist: Take your coding to the next level with Software Carpentry.
• And, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Taking a big-data approach to understand the role of reproductive isolation in species formation?
• New update from Queer in STEM: Examining the outness of queer folks at STEM workplaces.
• “This collection is among the first to reveal all major evolutionary stages of feather development in non-avian dinosaurs …” Dinosaur feathers found preserved in amber.
• Best or worst infection ever? A brewer’s yeast infection of the gut can make the ultimate micro-brew.
• Gee whiz. An editor at Nature goes right off the rails.
• One jab to rule them all? The basis for a “universal” flu vaccine may finally have been found.
• Optical illusion of the week. Here is a moth that looks like a leaf with curling edges.
• With charts! Why infographics are bad for conveying, you know, info.
• Sure, why the hell not? Did the universe begin in a five-dimensional black hole?
• Whew. Turns out that distance running doesn’t increase your risk of arthritis.

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Wallace didn’t collect this one. Photo by jby.

• This week, at The Molecular Ecologist: In some viruses, mutation rates may be shaped by simple population dynamics.
• And, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Do African herbivores run for their dinner, or for their lives?
• Bookmarked! A step-by-step guide for getting started with Github.
• What is this, 1920? No, we humans haven’t freed ourselves from natural selection.
• Because where else would it want them? Here is an insect with gears in its legs.
• Good news: they’re nothing new. Bad news: they’re nothing new. A brief history of human fretting about pimples.
• Found by a seventeen-year-old, too. Some butterflies collected by Alfred Russell Wallace, then apparently lost in a fire, have turned up in Oxford.
• Yep, they have it. The latest approach for reconstructing past environmental condition involves whales’ earwax.
• And how they link to animals’ physiology. A nice description of plant immune responses.
• Eyeing the exits is never a good sign for the thing you’re exiting. No, PhDs looking at non-academic careers is not a sign that we should make more PhDs.
• Vladimir Nabokov: He could write, he could catch butterflies, he could handle a colored pencil a little.
• “She was a professor?” Yeah, but she was an adjunct.

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Photo by CoffeeGeek.

• Queer in STEM update! A preliminary look at who participated in the online survey.
• This week at the Molecular Ecologist: Auto-magically manage your analytic software with Homebrew.
• And, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! You’re a scientific society with a financial surplus. How do you spend it?
• In-depth, that is. How to go about reading a scientific paper.
• Individuals aren’t averages. But … don’t averages have predictive power? Why psychological studies can’t tell you how to live.
• Get your head out of the sand and invest in solar. We might beat climate change by innovating, but we won’t beat it by denial.
• Attention spermologers. The emerging scientific value of Google’s Ngram viewer.
• More than grants, more than grad students, more even than the sweet respite of tenure. What faculty want is time.
• Also, less than English. Eek. Out of all the STEM fields, undergrad biology degrees earn the lowest starting salary.

And here’s some lovely video: footage of honeybee mating—taken in flight!

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Photo by dni777.

• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Microoganisms may not be able to form discrete species because they’re too small and numerous.
• And, at The Molecular Ecologist: How to use R to run STRUCTURE in parallel.
• Road trip! Except all year. The incredible, and probably unsustainable, journeys of commercial bee colonies.
• Because, yes, there are practical limits. At what point have we shared enough data?
• But does it add up to intelligence? How the “modules” of an ant’s brain work together.
• The code is just the starting point. A fantastic in-depth look at how environments shape gene expression.
• I believe I’ll have a drink. Why you shouldn’t “believe in” science, and why you might anyway.
• Yep. The shortage in science degrees that isn’t.
• Cognitive bias, exhibit 7,542. People are bad at spotting errors in mathematical reasoning that contradict their political leaning.

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Are better mass-market tomatoes on the horizon? Photo by rachelandrew.

• This week at the Molecular Ecologist: Introducing a new repository for useful snippets of code.
• Yum. Modern genetic methods and old fashioned cross-breeding may yet make supermarket tomatoes tasty.
• Selection is selection. An evaluation of genetically modified organisms, from an evolutionary biology perspective.
• God only knows what’ll happen to NSF. The “sequestration” budget cuts are wreaking havoc at NIH.
• Viral silliness. In which a marine biologist extensively objects to Buzzfeed.
• With video! NASA’s plan to capture and sample an asteroid.

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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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