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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Some web? Photo by feral godmother.

• Eek. Workers on a North Carolina hog farm are carrying multi-drug resistant Staphylococcus bacteria.
• Sure, why the hell not? A project to detect hazardous asteroids is going to be crowdfunded.
• For all your biological-numerical needs. The bionumbers database.
• Phylogeny matters. In the community structure of Cuban anoles.
• Well, okay then. Spiderwebs are electrostatically attracted to insects … but we don’t know whether that matters.
• Bollocks in, bollocks out. How a hair sample allegedly from Bigfoot turned out to contain DNA sequence from just about every other mammal.
• Do your [testes] hang low? Not if you’re Afrotherian. A surprisingly thorough, and unsurprisingly entertaining, investigation of the evolutionary origin of the scrotum.
• Beepocalypse not yet. In spite of ongoing worries about colony collapse disorder, it looks like U.S. commercial beekeeping is pretty stable.
• As they say, it’s just gas. One of the signs of planets in orbit of distant stars may not be created by planets after all.

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Photo by jby.

• Again. In which bad science in the service of sexism gets its comeuppance.
• There is a whole blog about corvids. And they know how to pull tails.
• Guys, there are taste receptors on your balls. And also on a lot of other parts of your body, apparently.
• “Wait … these lionfish are overweight?” The invasion of lionfish is so bad that the fish are obese.
• Leprosy is, evolutionarily, mighty stable. What was discovered by sequencing bacterial DNA from the bones of 14th-century lepers.
• Mendel v. Fisher. Why scientists screw up, and why the solution is more science.
• The dot’s barely even blue. Earth, photographed in extreme not-close-up.
• ““To do science is to search for repeated patterns, not simply to accumulate facts …” Reading Robert MacArthur’s Geographical Ecology.
• New bird species discovered! In the suburbs of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
• Like burning down the forest and replanting it to kill off some weeds, but still. Bone marrow transplants appear to have eliminated HIV infections in two more patients.
• This’ll come in handy. Teaching evolution through the lens of infectious disease.
• Sure, the paper’s retracted … but who’s got the movie rights? The story of a retracted Nature paper involves break-ins, tampering with experimental material, and hidden cameras.

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There’s more than one way to be a successful granular poison frog. Photo by brian.gratwicke.

• This year, in Snowbird. The blog-teams from Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! and The Molecular Ecologist are headed to the Evolution meetings, which start today in Snowbird, Utah. Watch both blogs for updates, or keep an eye on #Evol2013 on Twitter.
• Oh, and also: I was interviewed for an article about using online social media and mobile apps at conferences.
• In, to be clear, naked mole rats. Naked mole rats don’t get a lot of cancer, and a single molecule might explain a lot of that resistance.
• “This is a fabulous result for patients, physicians, scientists, and common sense.” An interview with the scientist who discovered the gene at the center of last week’s Supreme Court patent law decision.
• Or, you know, everyone. Why the ruling against gene patenting empowers everyone who as genes.
• One problem, many solutions. Trade-offs between color, behavior, and posion production in poison-arrow frogs.
• To PrEP or not to PrEP? The hurdles of including pre-exposure prophylaxis in HIV prevention plans.
• The fruits of homophobia and sex-phobia. A new documentary examines the HIV epidemic in the rural American South.
• Did your Ph.D. land you a full-time job? The Chronicle of Higher Education wants to know.
• It’s endosymbionts all the way down. You will not believe how many different kinds of interdependent bacteria are living as endosymbionts of citrus mealybugs.

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Photo by BarackObama.com.

• About that study of queer-identified folks in STEM: It’s off to a great start.
• No prior (heh) experience needed. A nice introduction to Bayesian statistics.
• But it’s maybe okay if you don’t mind being arrested by mistake. Why ubiquitous survelliance is a problem even if you don’t mind being watched—and that’s before we account for the how hard it is to prove innocence once suspicion is sparked.
• In mice. Gene knockouts that cause obesity and obssessive-compulsive behavior cancel each other out.
• At a zoo, even! Advice on finding a post-PhD career outside academia.
• Bout damn’ time. How television weather-people are coming around on global warming.
• What one thing should change in undergrad classes? Maybe you’d remove all the desks.
• You’re out of luck if you work with plants. When scientists take the Up-Goer Five challenge
• SCOTUS tries to rule on the Central Dogma. The U.S. Supreme Court rules that naturally occurring DNA sequences may not be patented. But the text of the decision [PDF] is drawing complaints from people who know actual biology, and one justice admitted in his concurrence that he doesn’t understand the science.

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Paleo-dieting Hiwi-style? Hope you like roast iguana. Photo by christophedemulder.

• Not at all the way it works in science. A brief guide to the way evolution works in science fiction.
• Woah. A project in nanotech fabrication captures images of the breakup and formation of carbon-carbon bonds.
• Yeah, don’t do this. Where “this” is e-mailing perfectly nice scientists and science writers and asking them to do your homework for you.
• Sweet. Candy company Mars launches a project to sequence the genomes of crops that are staples in the developing world.
• “… except perhaps, for Google+ posts.” Social media postings correlate with formal citations of scientific papers.
• Star Trek is for nerds; Star Wars is for geeks. The difference between nerds and geeks, quantified.
• Want to eat like a hunter-gatherer? First you’ve got to decide which kind of hunter-gatherer you are.
• “Evolutionary traps” When human-created environmental change turns adaptations into maladaptations.
• Color, insulation, even defense. What use were feathers before dinosaurs evolved flight?

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Barnacles. Photo by jby.

• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Tracing the origins of the fungus among us.
• Yay! Charges against DIY chemist Kiera Wilmot have been dropped, and she’s going to space camp.
• Wow: “75 percent of all tornadoes on Earth occur in North America.” For the devastating tornadoes that hit Oklahoma this week, some meteorlogical context.
• Yum! Acacias ensure that no one steals the food rewards provided for mutualistic ants by making poisonous food rewards.
• Good enough is good enough. The magic of evolution revealed in the inefficiency of an adaptation to poisonous environments.
• It would make sense. Could immune response influence human reproductive function?
• Whoops. Sweetened poisons have selected for cockroaches that can’t stand glucose.

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To the best of my knowledge, Spock never scanned sushi. Image via Frankie’s Soapbox.

• Congratulations! To the winners of the first ScienceSeeker Awards.
• It was only logical. How DNA barcoding may be making (one of) the capabilities of Mr. Spock’s tricorder a reality.
• I’m shocked. Shocked! Pest control company distributes guide to “USA spiders” including species not found in the U.S., misinformation about toxicity.
• For a given value of “fame.” Towards a mechanistic theory of fame in science.
• Perspective. Why barns are traditionally painted red, in the most ultimate sense.
• Cool. Land plants detect attacking aphids on other plants via mycorrhizal fungi.
• Good luck? On the widely-reported Chinese study of genetic variation underlying intelligence.
• Haven’t we already decided that’s bad? How discussion around that widely-reported Chinese study of genetic variation underlying intelligence is getting worryingly eugenical.
• Skeptically. How to write about science—as well as how to read about it.
• Oy. How really not to write about science—by taking scientists’ words completely out of context.

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Do we have enough time to teach conservatives about climate science before the storm hits? Photo by oldbilluk.

• In which I take a crack at social science. I’m collaborating on a survey of queer folks working in STEM fields! Have you taken it yet?
• Which history goes back farther than you knew. A historical perspective on colony collapse disorder in bees.
• Chicken, egg? When Republican voters understand climate science, they want someone to do something about climate change.
• Not even the real-world-possible version from 2001. Why the International Space Station doesn’t have artificial gravity.
• Holy poop! Scicurious reveals her “real” name.
• It’s not going away any time soon. More on political interference with peer review.
• But still not the original human language! Linguists identify 23 words in European, Asian, and Inuit languages that have shared roots in a common ice-age-era language.
• The better to evade bats with, my dear. Drab little moth sets record for sensitive hearing.
• See also Ecclisiastes. Scientific fraud: all of this has happened before.
• It’s the little things. On making a lab a nice place to work.
• More sampling = better, as usual. Ground-truthing the data in public databases of plant traits.
• An object lesson in coalescent processes. Why it’s not all that impressive to discover you’re descended from Charlemagne.

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