Best of lists, 2011

Presented in no order of precedence, quality, or importance:

• Kate Clancy rounds up online writing about ladybusiness anthropology—and I'm honored to have my own work listed alongside great pieces by folks including Emily Anthes, Jennifer Oulette, and Emily Willingham.
• Southern Fried Scientist ranks the top science hashtags on Twitter this past year.
• Ed Yong picks his favorite Not Exactly Rocket Science posts—there's everything from microscopic wasps to skull cups and out-of-body experiences.
• Brian Switek digs up (sorry!) the top dinosaur news.
• Alex Wild delivers a compilation of amazing insect photography. My favorite is the army ant soldier.

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Science online, auld lang syne edition

I think it's safe to assume this quail is totally high right now. Photo by Hiyashi Haka.

• Last call! If you haven't taken my reader survey yet, you have until the end of tomorrow! Thanks to everyone who's already answered!
• Do this now, please. Pitch in to help Jacquelyn Gill fund her trip to Science Online 2012.
• #UnBerable. More responses to Jesse Bering's latest embarrassment: Kate Clancy advises an anonymous Evidence-Free Science Provacateur and PalMD suggests Scientific American reconsider its relationship with Bering.
• Guess tenure hadn't been invented yet. How Charles Babbage tried to remove Isaac Newton's calculus methods from Cambridge.
• Video NSFW if you're a quail. What we can learn from studying the mating behavior of cocaine-addicted quail.
• Ugh. Satellite images document the spread of operations at the Alberta tar sands.
• Latina mortua est. Vivat lingua Latina! Botanists decide it's okay to name new species without describing them in Latin.
• It should be the same kind as ecology ... What kind of science, if any, is economics?
• A handy checklist. How to apply for a position as a grad student or postdoc.

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Stand up and be counted—take my reader survey!

Just a brief reminder: my reader survey is still open for responses! I'm going to keep it open (and probably prod you for answers) through the 31st. So please follow that link and tell me about yourselves and what you think of Denim and Tweed. It's all quite anonymous, and you can skip any question you'd rather not answer. Thanks in advance! ◼

Has Jesse Bering jumped the shark yet?

Photo via Octopus Overlords.

I have a history with Jesse Bering's evolutionary psychology writing, and I do, in fact, have better things to do over the holidays than deal extensively with his latest offense against evidence-based reasoning. But this one is pretty egregious: Bering pretends to be an advice columnist counseling a (hopefully imaginary) "hebephile" that there is a perfectly good adaptive explanation for lusting after "very young girls," even if our insufficiently evolution-conscious society frowns on it. Oy.

Bering cites a previous column arguing that attraction to young adolescents could be adaptive because youth correlates with fertility. Said column is conspicuously devoid of biological data. However, five minutes with Google found me an abstract that puts the age at which women's fertility is up to full adult capacity at about six years after their first periods. Given an average age of menarche at 12.5 years, that means it should be most adaptive to lust after, um, 18- to 19-year-olds.

A Calvin and Hobbes-ian season's greetings

Via Lost in Transcription. Happy holidays! ◼

Science online, you'd better not pout edition

How would you measure scientists' performance?. Photo by MarcelGermain.

• Tell me who you are, and what you think! Have you taken the D&T reader survey yet? Please do!
• Making sense of your holiday gift list. At Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!, Will Godsoe suggests some books for the biologist in your life.
• Tinker, tailor, soldier ... Most people have difficulty remembering other folks' names, but much less remembering their jobs or hobbies.
• Paging Marshall McLuhan. Kevin Zelnio's vision for online science outreach.
• All that is advantageous does not fix. The evolutionary importance of drift, succinctly explained.
• With video, this time. Scicurious takes on that study of fear and reproductive output in song sparrows.
• To the victor ... Crickets that win fights with other crickets become more aggressive afterward.
• What's in your metric? Counting journal articles as a metric of scientific achievement still makes sense.
• Neat! Circuits made with gallium-indium alloy can heal their own cracked wires.
• Looks like the TSA could use some peer review. Those body-scanning machines at airports are, in many cases, not as effective as a pat-down.

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Twelve months of Denim and Tweed, 2011

Following DrugMonkey's lead, here's the first sentence posted to this site every month in 2011. (I've cheated a bit by skipping over boring introductory material in one or two cases.)

• January: Happy New Year, everyone!
• February: My dear Hooker, I was grateful for your very kind wishes; and for the book about the Anoles of the West Indes, which I expect I shall read with much enjoyment.
• March: Plants' ancient relationship with animal pollinators is pretty crazy, when you think about it.
• April: In which a new technology loses its shine.
• May: What has two thumbs and forgot to submit to the Carnival of Evolution this month? This guy.
• June: Greg Laden hosts this month's Carnival of Evolution, the monthly compendium of online writing about descent with modification and all its consequences, complications, and controversies.
• July: So counterintuitive, it's counterfactual.
• August: The latest edition of the Carnival of Evolution, a monthly collection of online writing about evolution and all its ramifications, is online at Sandwalk.
• September: The September issue of the Carnival of Evolution is online now at The End of the Pier Show.
• October: It's been ages since I posted a recipe, but I'm still doing lots of cooking.
• November: This week at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, the big science post comes from ... me.
• December: Via Scott Chamberlain: A species of ants that lives in and around carnivorous pitcher plants isn't entirely freeloading.

Hey, I really kept on top of the Carnival of Evolution, eh? I did this last year, too. More quantitative navel-gazing coming in the new year. ◼

Take the D&T reader survey!

Surveying. Photo by danakin.

Inspired by previous efforts at other blogs, and spurred by Kevin Zenio's recent post on the importance of reader feedback, I've decided it's well past time to find out more about who's reading Denim and Tweed. I get some sense of the size and diversity of my readership from Google Analytics, and from who decides comment on or tweet about or "like" individual posts. However, it's pretty clear that some number of you read without responding in any medium I can see, and those are the folks about whom I'm most curious.

So if you would please take a minute or two to fill in this handy online form, I would be exceedingly grateful. None of the questions are required, but answers to all of them would be informative. This is your chance to let me know who's out there, and what you think of what I'm doing here at D&T. ◼

Science online, the pain of defying gravity edition

Hummingbird in flight. Photo by Jason Paluk.

• Congratulations! The winners of this year's NESCent science blogging contest have been chosen.
• We're really not that expensive. Want more scientific discoveries? Well, then maybe we should pay for more scientists.
• Darwin wasn't a jerk. Nineteenth century shipping timetables confirm that Darwin didn't screw over Alfred Russell Wallace.
• “The bird is so small and light that its bones are largely transparent to X-rays,” he said. X-ray video reveals the mechanics of hummingbird flight.
• Say it ain't so, Marty Stauffer! Lots of wildlife photography is staged. But that's probably not a big deal.
• Another reason to keep it natural. Most humans' body hair is lousy for insulation, but it does help deter parasites.
• For example, the pain of lying on a slight incline for hours? Microgravity environments may interfere with how astronauts perceive pain.
• One of these things is not like the other. A checklist for distinguishing real science from pseudoscience.
• A useful skill, in a herbivore. Sheep can differentiate between different kinds of food plants.

Video this week: tool use by an orange-dotted tuskfish. Specifically, the fish breaks open a clam by hitting it against a rock. Who needs opposable thumbs?


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#OccupyAmazon round 2: Cheap books are great, but someone's paying the difference

Brick-and-mortar. Photo by ImaginaryGirl.

Bouncing off the same NY Times op-ed that I did yesterday, Slate's Farhad Manjoo says, screw indy booksellers. They're not cheap or efficient enough. Here's the core of his price argument:

A few times a year, my wife—an unreformed local-bookstore cultist—drags me into one of our supposedly sacrosanct neighborhood booksellers, and I’m always astonished by how much they want me to pay for books. At many local stores, most titles—even new releases—usually go for list price, which means $35 for hardcovers and $9 to $15 for paperbacks. That’s not slightly more than Amazon charges—at Amazon, you can usually save a staggering 30 to 50 percent. In other words, for the price you’d pay for one book at your indie, you could buy two.

And here's efficiency:

Compared with online retailers, bookstores present a frustrating consumer experience. A physical store—whether it’s your favorite indie or the humongous Barnes & Noble at the mall—offers a relatively paltry selection, no customer reviews, no reliable way to find what you’re looking for, and a dubious recommendations engine. Amazon suggests books based on others you’ve read; your local store recommends what the employees like. If you don’t choose your movies based on what the guy at the box office recommends, why would you choose your books that way?

Manjoo also makes the point that indie bookstores aren't really selling local products—their bread and butter is sales of the same nationally distributed books that fill up Amazon's top sellers list. And since Amazon offers those books at a better price point, they're available to more people who want them, and that's all you need to sustain a literary culture, right?

#OccupyAmazon by occupying real bookstores

Uncle Hugo's, where it is entirely possible to trip over a stack of Asimov novels and break a model of the ship from Lost in Space if you're not careful. Photo by Olivander.

You may have heard that Amazon.com took its competition with brick-and-mortar booksellers to a new level this holiday season, offering a discount to people who go into a store and scan a product with Amazon's smartphone app to find out what price Amazon was offering for the same wares (presumably cheaper, and free of local sales tax). If you're not sure why this is an asshole move on the part of the gargantuan online retailer, you've got a good one in this op-ed by Richard Russo, who talks to a number of other authors, all of whom have done pretty well thanks to sales via Amazon, about the whole business. Money quote from Ann Patchett:

"... If you like seeing the people in your community employed, if you think your city needs a tax base, if you want to buy books from a person who reads, don’t use Amazon.”

I bought a lot of books as gifts this holiday season, and I'm glad to say I bought none of them from Amazon. Instead, I went to the collegiate used bookstore the Book House, the "indie behemoth" Magers & Quinn, and the astounding nerdcave that is Uncle Hugo's. I probably paid a bit more, and I'll have to figure out how to fit all the books in my carry-on instead of shipping them ahead of me, but I had a lot more fun doing the shopping, too. ◼

Frightened birds make bad parents

Song sparrow chicks. Photo by Tobyotter.

Predators have an obvious impact on their prey: eating them. But if the threat of predators prompts prey species to change their behavior, those behavioral changes can also affect prey population dynamics [$a]—and thereby, potentially, the prey's evolution—even if the predators never actually catch any prey.

This is the effect documented in a short, sharp study just published in Science, in which Liana Y. Zanette and her coauthors show that song sparrows raise fewer chicks if they simply think that there are predators nearby [$a].

The team's experimental design was simple but probably pretty work-intensive. Over the course of one summer on several small islands off the coast of British Columbia, they watched song sparrows choose mates and build nests. Once nests were established, the team surrounded them with anti-predator defenses: netting and electrified fences. They confirmed that these measures kept predators out with regular video surveillance. And then they turned on the loudspeakers.

Holiday baking

Grandma's date pudding. Photo by jby.

I could frankly do without a lot of holiday-time rituals, but I'm perfectly happy to have the excuse for baking. This year I made cranberry orange bread for the folks in my lab, following a great recipe in Mark Bittman's magisterial How to Cook Everything. I've also taken a crack at Ma Savage's Christmas Snowballs for one party, and for the departmental party, I dug up a family tradition: Grandma Bender's date pudding.

My mom's mom has a pretty serious sweet tooth, and so I learned to love this recipe—cubes of rich, sweet, date cake layered in sweetened whipped cream—as part of the main course for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. Nowadays, I cut the sugar from the whipped cream, and it still goes over quite well as a dessert. It's also possible to substitute in whole wheat or spelt flour, which only makes the cake denser and richer. Recipe follows:

Science online, ancestral penis reconstruction edition

You want to dissect my what?! Photo by GAC'63.

• I made the cut. The finalists for this year's Open Lab compilation of online science writing have been announced, along with many deserving runners up.
• This week, at Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! Luke Swenson described how understanding evolution lets scientists estimate the age of an HIV infection.
• It flows! Well, flowed. The Mars rover Opportunity has found gypsum, a mineral that can only form in the presence of liquid water.
• Meanwhile, even further out in space. The Kepler telescope identifies an Earth-sized planet at about the right distance from its sun for liquid water.
• One nucleic acid is not like another. The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans can transmit traits to its offspring that aren't encoded in its DNA.
• See also, graduate school. Medical school as a constellation of brief, intimate moments.
• See what happens when you don't take source-sink dynamics seriously? Herbivorous insects are evolving resistance to genetically modified Bt corn in the U.S.
• Collaborators! Invasive fire ants may be invasive because they work well with aphids.
• Which pretty much explains HuffPo science writing. Some guy at the Huffington Post thinks science writing would be better if science writers stopped listening to scientists.
• Hehe. Ostrich penises. A new detailed study of ostrich penises improves our understanding of bird evolution.
• Getting warmer. Peak attendance dates at national parks have moved about four days earlier over the last 30 years.

Video of the week, via Open Culture: Robert Krulwich describes behavioral experiments that dissected how ants navigate. (You may remember this as the subject of one of Jason Goldman's earliest posts.)


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Can't keep us apart: Brood parasitic birds have specialized on the same hosts for millions of years

A male greater honeyguide. Photo via Safari Ecology.

Brood parasitic birds lay their eggs in other birds' nests, a lazy approach to parenting that shapes the behavior and evolution of brood parasites in all sorts of interesting ways.

Brood parasite chicks often kill their adoptive nestmates, and can grow up confused about their species identity. To better trick their hosts into accepting "donated" eggs, many brood parasites have evolved eggs that mimic the hosts'—and some hosts have evolved contrasting eggs in response. A recent genetic study now shows an even subtler pattern arising from this host-parasite coevolutionary chase: lines of parasitic females that have specialized on the same host species for millions of years.

Open Lab 2011 finalists: I'm in a book (again)!

I've already tweeted about this last night, as soon as I got the e-mail—but Jennifer Ouellette has just made it official with the complete list of science blog posts chosen for Open Lab 2011. And among them is my long discussion of natural selection and homosexuality. It'll be great to see that piece in actual dead-tree print. It'll be even better to see it alongside top-notch writing from such a long list of folks whose work I admire. ◼

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: Tracing the evolutionary history of HIV infection

The molecular structure of HIV. Photo by PHYLOMON!.

In the latest post at the group blog Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!, contributor Luke Swenson describes how biologists can reconstruct the evolutionary history of HIV to estimate when the virus make the jump from chimps to humans, or even when a single patient became infected.

Although HIV evolves rapidly, it does so at a fairly constant rate. In essense, you can use this constant rate to act like a clock to tell you roughly how many changes accumulate over a year. Then, by figuring out the number of changes it would take for both sequences to converge on a single identical sequence (their most recent common ancestor, “MRCA”), you can get an estimate of the date that the MRCA existed at.

This is one of the best cases I know about in which evolution directly informs medical practice and treatment, and it's well worth reading the whole thing. ◼

Diversity in Science Carnival No. 11: Native American Heritage Month edition

There's a new edition of the Diversity in Science blog carnival out today, too: Urban Scientist DNLee rounds up stories of Native Americans in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines for Native American Heritage Month. It includes meditations on the value of cultural diversity in science, celebrations of individual scientists, and discussion of scientific insights from Native cultures that we're still just beginning to recognize. ◼

Carnival of Evolution, December 2011: A very special carnival of evolution

Forty-two. Photo by Valerian Gaudeau.

The new Carnival of Evolution, freshly posted over at the Ocelloid, is the forty-second iteration of the monthly roundup of online writing about evolution, the universe, and everything. Well, maybe not everything.

Highlights include, but are not limited to, Larry Moran illustrating the difference between census population size and effective population size, Hannah Waters on the evolutionary context of grieving, and Jenna Gallie's description of her own research on rapid adaptive evolution by E. coli. There are also multiple contributions from Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!, in case you haven't already seen them. Go read the whole thing, and don't forget your towel. ◼

Science online, gesturing ravens edition

Raven in flight. Photo by ingridtaylar.

• In mice! Gene therapy has proven effective at preventing HIV infection.
• Still no opposable thumbs, thank heavens. Ravens gesture to other ravens with their beaks.
• Awww. The embryonic development of anoles, imaged.
• Eight-month-old infants understand justifiable meanness.
• A gene "for" many things, or nothing? Mutations to a single gene may cause many different malformations.
• But only until the flavor runs out. Chewing gum helps you concentrate.
• Romans weren't so careful about "leave no trace." European plant communities still show the effects of ancient Roman settlements.
• I mean, seriously. Gender-specific science kits are not a good way to get girls into science, and not really helpful for boys, either.

And lastly, here's video of a starfish-inspired "boneless" robot in action. Good luck getting to sleep tonight!


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Pitcher plant ants keep their host clean

Via Scott Chamberlain: A species of ants that lives in and around carnivorous pitcher plants isn't entirely freeloading. They also clean the walls of the plant's pitfall trap, keeping it nice and slippery for insect-trapping.



Of course, the ants have a vested interest in keeping the trap effective, since they eat some portion of the critters caught by their host. But it seems pretty straightforward to think that this helps the pitcher plant, too. A more definitive test would be to compare the survival and seed production of pitcher plants grown with and without a colony of ants to keep them clean. ◼