Science online, miraculous maps edition

Nothing like the real thing. Photo by Jamie Anderson.

• It's a magical-seeming discovery! The molecular biology of miracle fruit, which makes sour taste sweet.
• For one thing, you can't get lost in a map. Seeing a place is not the same as physically moving around within it—on a neurological level.
• I'm just catching up on these, I know. Sarcozona interviews Jeremy Fox, Zen Faulkes, and Jean Burns.
• When you've got eight to start with ... Spiders deal with missing legs pretty quickly.
• Shiny! Fossilized in the right conditions, beetles keep their colors for millions of years.
• Sample size matters. A Bayesian perspective on understanding Amazon seller ratings.
• Top-notch long form. The biologist behind "arsenic life," profiled.
• Jurassic cluck. A paleontologist wants to recreate dinosaurs from chickens.
• Knowing the limits. Defining expertise in terms of what you don't know.
• More than a pinch. The salinity of the world's oceans, measured from orbit.
• No fruit salad is safe. The latest food-bourne illness outbreak is from contaminated cantaloupe.

And now video, via Kevin Zelnio, of the sand tiger shark's embryonic, siblicidal cannibalism. Ew?


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What does evolution have to do with the cost of police in Switzerland? Probably not much.

Lucerne, Switzerland. Photo by Jamie McHale.

So a little while ago, I was perusing the latest from PLoS ONE while doing some low-attention-requiring lab work Monday afternoon, and a title caught my eye: "A test of evolutionary policing theory with data from human societies." Oh, hey. That looked interesting.

The paper's author, Rolf Kümmerli, claims to have found evidence for a particular kind of evolutionary model of cooperation in recent economic data from Switzerland. The problem Kümmerli addresses is a classic one: from the perspective of natural selection, individuals (apparently) have little evolutionary incentive to cooperate, unless they're relatives. And yet, we see cooperation in human societies.

One solution to this quandary has been group-level selection, which is a whole 'nother kettle of worms. Another is that policing behavior could evolve to help keep groups of less-closely-related people cooperative. Of course, modern human societies are a long way past the days when most of us lived in villages that were also basically big extended families. Kümmerli proposes that we might use some sort of rule of behavioral thumb to (unconsciously) assess how likely it is we're interacting with close relatives—which is less likely in bigger communities, and communities with larger immigrant populations.

Er, what?

Science online, Easter Island sustainability edition

Easter Island. Photo by vtveen.

• Easter Island is no Greenland. The collapse of Polynesian society on Easter Island may not have been due to ecological damage, but a terminal case of Europeans.
• Angry Birds can't do that. Players of an online game have resolved the structure of a key HIV protein.
• The kids are all right. David Dobbs draws together emerging research on the brains of teenagers.
• You're running late. But so is everyone else. Our perception of the present is really a remembrance of the immediate past.
• Fortunately, I hear that the honey badger doesn't care. The popular idea that honey guide birds lead honey badgers to beehives is probably a myth.
• Hold your horses, Jean-Baptiste. Heritable epigenetic changes to gene expression may not have much impact over evolutionary time.
• Predator becomes prey. Ground beetle larvae prey on much larger frogs and toads by luring them in for an attack.

And finally, via SciAm, the peacock spider. Check out that thorax!


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Reasons to download the entirety of the "Savage Lovecast" archives, in order

Dan Savage. Photo by soundfromwayout.

8. Because you're training for a marathon/ putting in a lab-work marathon/ cleaning house/ doing anything that's better with someone talking in your earphones, and you're just not getting enough with NPR, Slate, and that one about the things from the British Museum—and you've already used up all the Audible.com freebies offered via those podcasts

7. To hear Dan take a victory lap after Rick Santorum lost his Senate seat (while trying not to dwell on how U.S. politics have changed/not changed/gotten ten times worse since then)

6. As part of creating a drinking game for a sex-ed themed cocktail party (maybe you're hosting a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood?)

5. For the episode recorded immediately after Thanksgiving dinner

4. To pin down the exact moment of origin of the phrase "tech-savvy at-risk youth"

3. For every time Dan has a special guest/ co-host/ foil

2. Because back in the day Dan and/or the TSARY weren't so selective about which calls deserved an answer

1. For the old, Monty Pythonesque brass band intro music

It's all available via www.thestranger.com!

Edit, 2011.09.29: Corrected link to the Savage Love archives. Oops! ◼

At long last, an answer!

To my exasperated question:

Comic from Darwin Eats Cake.

It's ... actually kinda plausible. But I think that, if Guillaume manages to overcome his vexation, he might also note that there's probably some sort of marginal fitness benefit associated with landing a regular gig at Slate. ◼

Science online, tastefully uphostered placeboes edition

No in-flight drinks on this trip. Photo by pheanix.

• Take note, Book of Leviticus. Menstruating women are not poisonous.
• Oops? As many as half of all neuroscience papers may make a basic statistical error.
• Talk about commitment. Migrating birds supply themselves with water by breaking down their own muscles.
• Well, why not? The placebo effect may be as much about waiting room décor as it is about a well-designed sugar pill.
• First, remove the stack of unread manuscripts from thine own inbox. Is peer review broken, or are we all just lousy peers?
• Billions. The costs of introduced insects, estimated.
• Not a monster-themed alternative history, either. Abraham Lincoln, forensic meteorologist.
• Hundreds of billions. The economic return on investment of ones of billions in NIH research funding, estimated.
• Wait. Rats' ears can ring? A possible cure for ringing ears, demonstrated in rats.
• Prince, biologist, geologist, anarchist, fan of Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Eric Michael Johnson interviews the author of a new biography of Peter Kropotkin.
• Might be pretty humid, though. Astronomers identify an exoplanet about the right distance from its primary to support life as we know it.
• Brains aren't as hard to come by as we thought. A new phylogeny of the molluscs supports four independent origins of complex brains.

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Passwords and eviction notices: How do plants keep their bacterial partners honest?

The nodule-y roots of a soybean plant. Original photo by Pro-Soil AG Solutions.

Nitrogen is one of the elemental building blocks of life as we know it—it's a basic component of amino acids, which are in turn the building blocks of proteins, which form the building blocks and moving parts of every living cell. The nitrogen interwoven in our tissues originated as part of the atmosphere we breathe, but the path from atmosphere to living flesh is far less direct than drawing a breath. Atmospheric nitrogen becomes useful to us animals only via an intimate relationship between a plant and bacterial growing in its roots.

The bacteria, called rhizobia, have the rare ability to "fix" free-floating nitrogen into biologically useable form. In return for this nitrogen source, the host plant allows the rhizobia to infect a specialized knob of root tissue, a root nodule, which it supplies with sugar for the benefit of its nitrogen-fixing guests. The plant uses the fixed nitrogen to make proteins for its own use, and anything that eats the plant afterwards benefits.

If all this sounds familiar, it's because the interaction between plants and rhizobia is the focus of my developing postdoctoral research, and I've been writing about it as I've done more reading about it. Specifically, I've been interested in how plants might be able to make sure their root nodules house helpful bacteria rather than freeloaders, who enjoy the sugar supply inside the nodule without fixing nitrogen in return.

I've discussed a couple of different mathematical models that suggest some options. However, models are really just formal ways to follow through the implications of a particular idea, not necessarily descriptions of what actually transpires between a plant and the rhizobia inside its roots. So I thought it might make sense to step back and survey what we presently know about what goes on inside those root nodules.

Ten years

Ten years ago today, I was in organic chemistry lab when the prof walked in and mentioned, somewhat casually, that an airplane had apparently hit one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. We all assumed it was some accident, and I distinctly remember picturing a small private plane of some sort.

By the time I was done synthesizing and purifying and precipitating, I returned to the dorm to find everyone gathered around CNN, watching looped footage of not one but two full-sized commercial airliners striking the towers.

Ten years later, it seems the entire United States is still gathered around 24-hour cable news, still watching the planes strike the towers. If, like me, you find it easiest to contemplate those ten years in numbers, Wired's Danger Room has compiled an elegant series of infographics illustrating the costs and consequences of the last decade.

Graphic by Danger Room.

It's only data. It cannot, of itself, tell us whether the last ten years were well spent. ◼

Science online, hyphenated surnames edition

A caribou in Denali National Park, Alaska. Photo by blmiers2.

• Biodiversity riches needn't beggar their neighbors. Longstanding conventional wisdom that protected wild areas depress the economies of nearby communities turns out to be untrue.
• You say you want a revolution? Humans may riot not because we're evolved to riot; but because we're not evolved to deal with stressful times.
• Not unlike wearing a wedding band. The decision to take your spouse's last name when you marry may say a lot about you, except when it doesn't.
• And, yes, like humans. Even though it sounds like whistling, dolphins form sound by vibration, just like other mammals.
• Interesting yes, but not quite enlightening. It's no surprise that conservatives and liberals think differently, so it's probably not surprising that their brains look different.
• To panic, or not to panic? A conversation about the upcoming, highly-researched pandemic film Contagion.
• Simultaneously awesome and disgusting. A virus prompts caterpillars to climb to the top of a tree, then melts their flesh.

Science online, hungover ticks edition

Nasty stuff, regardless of where you drink it. Photo by Darby Rose.

• Which is why I stick with gin and tonic. "Four Loko" might not be extra-intoxicating because it combines caffeine and alcohol, but because it doesn't taste alcoholic.
• Go easy on the pawpaw, too. Too many carrots can, in fact, turn you orange.
• When he helps with the cover-up, I think probably yes. When a graduate student falsifies results, is his or her advisor responsible?
• Forty. Percent. Profits. The case against for-profit academic publishing. (But see also.)
• Good digestion goes a long way. Mice fed "probiotic" bacteria seem to be less stressed out.
• I'm sure we're all glad to know that the tick phylogeny is now much clearer. A rare and unique species of tick has been rediscovered in South Africa almost thirty years after it was last seen.
• "We had Kate Winslet learning how to pipet." The new film Contagion aims to accurately portray an emerging epidemic.
• Especially great if you're shopping for a graduate advisor. If you haven't already, go check out Sarcozona's ongoing series of interviews from the ESA meetings.
• Yes, it's a link to another linkfest. Ed Yong picks his favorite online science writing of August 2011.

Carnival of Evolution, September 2011

Photo by joiseyshowaa.

The September issue of the Carnival of Evolution is online now at The End of the Pier Show. Okay, it's not as glamorous as the better known September issue, but it's still the number one spot for a month's worth of online writing about descent with modification and all its scientific, cultural, and political ramifications. A few highlights:

• ItTakes30 on the cool new study of cooperation in biofilm-forming bacteria.
• Zen Faulkes on how tiny worms evade an ensnaring fungus.
• Jerry Coyne points out a probable case of sympatric speciation in palms.