Joshua trees! Photo by jby.

• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Sarah Hird does not believe that, in science, womens’ underconfidence is their weakness.
• Brilliant. Want to survey a bunch of elusive mammals? Just sample the insects that have already collected DNA samples for you.
• With a headline about tentacle sex, natch. The latest study on Joshua trees and their pollinators, discussed at Pharyngula.
• Depends. Do 70-hour weeks sound “stressful?” Is being a professor the least stressful job?

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Quack. Photo by blmiers2.

• The first Carnival of Evolution for 2013! Now online at Genome Engineering
• Sure, why the hell not? Did “restless genes” help humans conquer the planet? (Seriously, this is a good piece.)
• If it quacks like a quack … The science-free advice of Dr. Oz.
• Diversity of sampling for the win. How hormonal birth control might mess with mate choice—for both straight and gay women.
• I mean, really, who doesn’t know to smell their tea for bitter almonds? Thank the gods for dumb poisoners.
• Very, very, effective cows. Are leafcutter ants farmers, or cows?
• Don’t be the third reviewer. Unless you have to. Advice on how to peer-review a paper.
• Smarter isn’t always better. Selecting guppies for bigger brains demonstrates that big brains are expensive.
• Yow. Pioneering anti-GMO activist apologizes, says genetic engineering can be environmentally beneficial.

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Romance novels are totally evidence of sexual conflict in humans, you guys. Photo by Stewf.

• Empathy matters. What the “Christmas Truce” of 1914 can tell us about trust and cooperation.
• Happy new year! Worldwide crop yields are stagnating or declining. (Original article here)
• Eek. The funding rate for the new NSF granting process is about five percent.
• Reductio ad absurdam. Evolutionary psychologists go looking for evidence in romance novel titles.
• Fire, or spaghetti? Physicists get hot and bothered about how, exactly, a black hole would kill you.
• Oy. Why a proposed genetic analysis of the Newtown gunman is probably futile and not helpful.
• Membranes! A new hypothesis for the origins of life on Earth.

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Photo by Dan W Conway.

• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! A new paper on the developmental origins of sexual orientation doesn’t break much new ground. See also Jon Wilkins’s in-depth dissection of said paper.
• And at The Molecular Ecologist. I talk pronghorn, sexual selection, and marker choice with Stacey Dunn.
• Westerward leading? Following a star isn’t exactly a good way to navigate in a straight line.
• A mere 12 lightyears away! There might be an earth-like world orbiting Tau Ceti.
• Add’em to the list. Is Antarctica under threat from invasive insects?
• Depression and dopamine. A discussion in two parts.
• The shape of things to come. Next-gen sequencing used to generate informative markers for a previously unsequenced endangered elephant.
• But with a somewhat less bloodshed. Why the academic job market is like the Hunger Games.
• Nooope. Does college make students more liberal?

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Photo by Jvstin.

• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Devin Drown reviews The Adaptive Landscape in Evolutionary Biology.
• And at the Molecular Ecologist: The carnival of knowing what I know now.
• Surprise? The biodiversity of a cornfield is pretty depressing.
• Handy. Tinkering with fishes’ developmental genes recreates (a bit) of the evolution of fins into digits.
• Of course, winter means wearing more clothes, which harbor lice … Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was stymied not by winter, but by lice carrying typhus.
• It is, as they say, all in your head. The physical reality underlying near-death experiences.
• A mess, but one we need to clean up. Race, poverty, and access to education.
• Inactivated what now? A new therapy for leukemia that uses inactivated HIV to reprogram white blood cells looks promising.
• For all the good that will do. Climate scientists are starting to use alarming talk titles at conferences.
• A crucial question. How well would wine grapes really grow in world of Game of Thrones?

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Mount Saint Helens. Photo by prorallypix.

• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: What happens when genes move from the mitochondria to the nucleus.
• Oy. Why that immortal jellyfish really isn’t at all. (Plus bonus phylogenetic stupidity.)
• But baking is still a useful skill, right? Why landing a tenure-track job isn’t like baking.
• What part of the brain lights up when you read a thorough skewering? The trouble with neuro-hype — and why a “neuroscience Newton” wouldn’t fix it.
• Also, you need to be a pygmy mole cricket. To jump from the surface of the water, you need spring-loaded paddles on your legs.
• J.B.S. Haldane. What famous evolutionary ecologists would you invite to dinner?
• Pending appropriate funding. NASA’s going to follow up the successful Mars rover with another one launching in 2020 — and maybe someday humans.
• “Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!” An interactive map of people who died in the Mount Saint Helens eruption.
• Yay? Birds’ nests built with cigarette butts deter parasites.
• As opposed to all the ones he’d smoked before it. How Yassir Arafat might have been killed by a single cigarette.
• Yep. The special awkwardness of the holiday break during grad school.

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Photo by ianturton.

• This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Why science denialism isn’t just about the facts.
• Or we shouldn’t be, anyway. Scientists are not monks.
• Is there a genetic predisposition to believing this? Are humans evolving lower intelligence?
• Depends what you mean by “random.” Are peer review decisions made at random?
• Well, kinda. NASA is talking seriously about building a warp drive.
• No mention of Russian invasions, either. Data visualization back in the day.
• Oy. Time Magazine nominates the Higgs Boson for “Person of the Year,” mangages to completely botch a description of the Higgs boson.
• Bears, ants, chickens. Non-human animals that can count.

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The whale today. Photo by djwtwo.

• This week at The Molecular Ecologist: How to pick a programming language.
• Also, why biologists still speak Latin. How the North American turkey was, indirectly, named after the Eurasian nation-state Turkey.
• Not-bad news, everyone! Americans will, sometimes, vote for better funding of public universities.
• Terrible news, everyone. The climate change prognosis is looking a lot worse.
• No word about the squid, though. How the American Museum of Natural History built a life-size blue whale before anyone involved had actaully seen a whole blue whale, in two parts.
• Yes, there’s oxytocin in nematodes. It’s called nematocin.
• It’s just not as easy to see. Black people do, in fact, get sunburns.
• Tiny pamphlets about abstinence? What do you do when a protected species is about to interbreed itself to extinction?
• Go ahead, break a leg. (Not really.) Raising a baby doesn’t necessarily have to be bad for a woman’s bones.

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Photo by Romain Bochet.

• This week at The Molecular Ecologist: I post some advice about grad school. Think you can do better? Send a submission to the “Knowing What I Know Now” blog carnival.
• Calling in the undersea cavalry. Under attack by toxic seaweed, coral releases chemicals to attract seaweed-eating fish.
• The usual suspects. Antibiotic over-use is on the decline across the U.S., but some states are doing better than others.
• Sounds a lot like “making things for science journals.” Thoughts and musings about making things on the web.
• Try not to throw a tantrum over this one. In which doubt is cast on a “mood disorder” description just before its official appearance in the DSM-5.
• Scratching yet? A slideshow of prehistoric parasites.
• Get ready to fret about your pageviews. Granting agencies are starting to accept web traffic as an impact metric.
• Scientific (or other) writing. A handy guide.
• Yeah, not really. Are we really so suprised that quantiative traits have complex underlying genetics?

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