FieldNotes: Honey Badger Don’t Care!

Biology Finally Explains Why Honey Badger Don’t Care by Megan Cartwright at Slate:

It’s official: Honey badger don’t care. This “crazy nasty-ass” critter—the subject of a National Geographic documentary transformed into a viral meme through satirical overdubbing—“really don’t give a shit.” Not about snarky documentaries, not about stinging bees, and especially not about venomous snakes......

What happens when the sea swallows a country? by Rachel Nuwer at BBC Future:

As the seaplane lifts off the water’s surface and begins to climb, paradise opens up beneath us. The deep blue ocean stretches in every direction, but it is punctuated here and there by aquamarine discs of shallow coral reef that give way to the slightest slivers of white sand. Lavish hotels clinging to those oases sprout tentacles of bungalows, extending their small stake of precious solid ground. People come from all over the world to experience the impeccable luxury of the Maldives, a nation composed of around 1,200 islands, located 370 miles (595km) off the southernmost tip of India. Despite its remoteness, the resorts here – each located on its own private island – are unparalleled. Guests can sip $40 (£25.60) glasses of Champagne at freshwater pools’ swim-up bars, dine on Russian caviar and Wagyu steak, and stream the latest episode of Game of Thrones in their air-conditioned suite. Nothing is lacking, nothing is out of reach.......

A Sleep Researcher's Attempt to Build a Bank for Dreams by Andy Wright at :

For many people, listening to just one person describe their dreams is a nightmare. But for G. William Domhoff, it’s a calling; as a dream researcher, he listens to them professionally. But even a dream doctor has his limits. “As soon as people find out what I do, they want me to interpret their dream,” says Domhoff, a research professor in psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of several books on dreams. But dreams are a numbers game and Domhoff prefers to work with big data sets, not a single offering. Over the years he has collected and analyzed a vast library of dreams and is one of the founders of The DreamBank, an online archive of over 22,000 dreams. The database, which is available for the public to sift through, is an attempt to quantify one of the most ephemeral of human experiences......

The Little Boy Who Should’ve Vanished, But Didn’t by Robert Krulwich at Curiously Krulwich:

He was 12 years old. He was a slave. He’d had no schooling. He was too young, too unlettered, too un-European; he couldn’t have done this on his own. That’s what people said. dmond (he had no last name—slaves weren’t allowed them) had just solved a botanical mystery that had stumped the greatest botanists of his day. In the early 1800s he was a child on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, and yet, against overwhelming odds, Edmond would get credit for his discovery—and for the most surprising reasons. I want to tell you his story. So I’ll start here, with a plant.......

Ain't Nobody Got Tine for That! The Invention and Evolution of the Fork by Layla Eplett at Food Matters:

At one point in time, there was a fork in the road and some people decided to eat with it. Okay, that may be oversimplifying things a bit too much. Cooper-Hewitt’s Sarah Coffin curated the museum’s “Feeding Desire” exhibition and has spent over thirty years researching the topic. She explains the fork was late to join the knife and spoon to complete the West’s cutlery trio. “Both the knife and spoon really have ancient origins. The spoon was the first thing people put into their mouth. The fork started its existence as a utensil to hold a piece of meat or to hold something while you carved it. Its entrance into individual usage comes really as a dessert object.”......

Mind Meld: Social Wasps Share Brainpower by Laura Geggel at Live Science:

Wasps that live in large, social colonies may "share" brainpower, a new study finds. It takes a lot of brainpower to socialize. Animals that are social typically have large brains, or at least large areas in their brains that control higher cognition. But the opposite is true for wasps, the researchers found. As wasps become more social, the brain regions responsible for complex cognition decrease in size......

Back to the Jurassic by Henry Gee at A View from the Bridge:

.............I won’t be spoiling anything to say that the plot is, in essence, the same as the franchise’s first three: Jurassic Park, The Lost World and Jurassic Park III. People travel to an island and meet dinosaurs. Some people are eaten by dinosaurs. Some of the dinosaurs eat one another. The rest of the people escape. Seen one, seen ‘em all. Where Jurassic World succeeds is by upping the tooth count while at the same time nodding affectionately to the original in countless ways, large and small, all of which I shall leave it to you to discover...........

What’s Wrong With the Flying Pterosaurs in Jurassic World by Rhett Allain at Wired:

I’m not a paleontologist, that should be obvious. However, these flying pterosaurs (they are not dinosaurs) are not just bigger versions of your backyard birds. No, they are huge. If there is one thing I hope you would learn from reading this blog it would be that big things are not the same thing as small things. We call this the physics of scale. Although flying is complicated, think of a bird flying at a constant speed. In order to maintain a constant altitude, the lift generated by the wings must be equal to the weight of the bird. What does the lift depend on? Moving faster generates more lift, but so does a larger surface area. Let’s take a generic bird and scale it up........

40 Years of Bad Science: How Jaws Got Everything Wrong About Sharks by David Shiffman at Gizmodo:

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of its original release, Jaws will be shown on the big screen once more on June 21st. Few other movies have cast such a long shadow into the “real” world as the first summer blockbuster. As a marine biologist whose research focuses on shark conservation, I’ve been living in that shadow for my entire professional life. Jaws was a great horror movie, perhaps too great. It made people absolutely terrified of real-life sharks. “There’s no question that Jaws terrified at least a couple generations of beachgoers and fed damaging misconceptions of sharks,” said Sonja Fordham, President of Shark Advocates International. Many people, including my parents, were afraid to go swimming for months after seeing Jaws. Decades later, there’s almost always someone in the audience at my public talks about shark research and conservation who cites Jaws as “proof” that sharks are scary and bad. The plot of Jaws revolves around a long-discredited scientific theory which claims that some individual “rogue sharks” develop a taste for humans and intentionally hunt us. ......

Pornucopia by Maria Konnikova at Aeon:

I don’t remember how old I was when I had my first encounter with pornography, but I must have been around 10 – the experience is entwined with the sound of the AOL dial-up tone. It was something relatively benign – a close-up photo of some genitalia – and I wasn’t much shocked. I grew up in a family not given to sugarcoating the realities of the human condition and I’d known what to expect. But what if I’d grown up a decade or so later, when the internet had graduated beyond the old-school chatrooms and into the ubiquitous juggernaut of today? My memory might have been decidedly different.....

Drugs, Alcohol and... Exercise? by Allison Brager at Fitness Cult Chronicles:

I am a dopamine junkie. Want proof? I've got a dopamine necklace. Not impressed? I've got it tattooed on my freaking arm. Dopamine is produced in the brain and regulates our pleasure and pain. That's right - although they seem like opposites, the brain has difficulty discriminating between the two. Don't believe me? Remember this article the next time you are voluntarily suffering through Fran. It also has a hard time differentiating between different types of rewards. When it comes to the basics - food, sex, exercise and drugs, the brain reacts in similar ways. When a human, or any animal, is confronted with one of these basic rewards, there is a dopamine pump from the brain. The size of the dopamine release is determined by the strength, frequency and duration of the reward. The bigger the reward, the bigger the release of dopamine.......

Memento Mori – remember that you have to die by Phillip George at The Conversation:

“Memento mori” means, literally, “remember death.” In the early 21st century, we in the privileged global north rarely encounter death close up and personal as an everyday part of our lives. In the Australia of 2015 our politicians are planning for us to work until we reach 70 years of age, and we’ve well and truly moved on from the Biblical life span of “three score years and ten”. With all of our technological, surgical, pharmaceutical inventions and devices, we expect, almost demand, to live a long life, live it in good health and look good doing it. We live in denial that we will die. But past civilisations - from the ancient Greeks to the Victorians - were acutely aware of their own mortality. Memento mori was the philosophy of reflecting on your own death as a form of spiritual improvement, and rejecting earthly vanities.

When is vagueness a virtue in science? by Jeremy Fox at Dynamic Ecology:

Like a lot of people, I think precision is a virtue in science. One sign of scientific progress is increasing precision, often but not necessarily expressed mathematically. For instance, Darwin got a lot right without using any math–but we’ve since learned a lot more about evolution than we could have otherwise by expressing Darwin’s ideas more precisely and mathematically. Or think of how the vagueness with which ecologists define “biodiversity” and “ecosystem function” leaves us vulnerable to critical scrutiny. Or think of how Bob May’s math undermined and corrected previous verbal intuitions about how “diversity” or “complexity” might relate to “stability” in ecology. Thereby forcing future ecologists working on that topic to quit waving their arms and instead say exactly what they meant. We need math because the consequences of our assumptions often can’t be worked out without math, and because our choice of words often misleads us in subtle but important ways. Some profound scientific ideas can’t even be expressed verbally, at least not without doing the math first. So in the spirit of being contrarian with myself,* here’s a question: can vagueness rather than precision ever be a virtue in science? Vagueness is sometimes inevitable, such as when some new idea is first being developed. But is it ever desirable, so that we wouldn’t want to get rid of it even if we could?......

Just Because We Believe It Doesn’t Make it True… by David Ramey DVM at Horse Collaborative:

No matter what product or therapy I write about, and no matter how implausible the therapy, or how sparse the evidence for its effectiveness, I almost always get a comment to the effect of, “It works for me!”

Sex and the Single Male Bird: Why Uncoupled Individuals Matter by John R. Platt at Extinction Countdown:

Single males are the George Costanzas of the animal kingdom. They’re outsiders. Nobody pays much attention to them. Conservationists rarely bother to watch them or learn where they live. They’re effectively invisible to the world, much like our favorite obnoxious bumbler on the classic network sitcom, Seinfeld. Maybe that should change. According to a paper published this week in Evolutionary Applications, these un-mated males could actually be some of the most important individuals in the populations of certain endangered species......

Green Spaces Make Kids Smarter by Olga Khazan at The Atlantic:

When I lived in L.A., I reported on a school near Long Beach in which nearly a fifth of the students had asthma. One culprit seemed to be the school’s unfortunate geography: About 500 trucks passed by its grounds every hour, and according to a study released at the time, at least 9 percent of childhood-asthma cases in the area were attributable to road traffic. The air near the school, which sometimes smelled rotten or rubbery, contained nearly twice the normal level of elemental carbon, a marker of diesel particles.....

'Inside Out' Movie Reflects the Realities and Fantasies of Neuroscience by Alan Boyle at NBC News:

"Inside Out" is more than just the latest animated movie from Pixar — the makers of "Toy Story," "Up," "Finding Nemo" and more. It's also a kid-friendly introduction to real-life neuroscience. Eric Chudler, who's the executive director of the University of Washington's Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering as well as the creator of the "Neuroscience for Kids" website, thinks that's great: "Any type of portrayal of the brain in cartoons can get kids interested in how the brain works and what makes it tick," he said. And "Inside Out" isn't just any portrayal: Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, an expert on the science of emotions, was a consultant on the movie — which portrays Joy, Anger, Sadness, Fear and Disgust as colorful characters interacting inside the brain of an 11-year-old girl named Riley. .......

Inside Out is the best Pixar movie ever by Alex Abad-Santos at Vox
The Psychology of Inside Out: A Beautiful Lesson in Emotional Intelligence by Andrea Letamendi at Under the mask






And if that is not enough, more readings for later this weekend:

Island Bears by Cassandra Willyard at The Last Word On Nothing
Why Do Graveyard Shifts Wreak Havoc on Human Metabolism? by Dina Fine Maron at Scientific American
Can Your E-mails Identify You as a Traitor? Rogue Employees & Deception Detection by Jessica Bodford at Jessica Bodford's Musings
Playing in Traffic by Brian Hayes at American Scientist
Engineering an Internal Clock by Stephanie Garlock at Harvard Magazine
Science Confirms: Honey Badger Don't Care by Rebecca OConnell at Mentalfloss
DNA is life's blueprint? No, there's far more to it than that by Claire Ainsworth at New Scientist
Can We Engineer an American Chestnut Revival? by Rebecca Rupp at The Plate
What Pope Francis and scientists have in common when they look at the natural world by Chris Mooney at Washington Post
Wild bees are dying off and need to be protected — but not for the reasons you think by Chelsea Harvey at Washington Post
Rhino Horn Knock Offs by Asher Jay at Jay Jotting



Game of chances: inheritance is a question of probability, not destiny by Adam Rutherford at Comment is free
Why the U.S. Military Is Into Bee Brain Surgery by Justin Nobel at Nautilus
5 simple chemistry facts that everyone should understand before talking about science by Fallacy Man at The Logic of Science
See the Flowers that Bloom All At Once, One Night a Year by Michele Lent Hirsch at Smithsonian
How Finland Could Turn Horse Poop Into Power by Feargus O'Sullivan at Citylab
What Makes Magic Funny? by Susana Martinez-Conde at Illusion Chasers
How the Horse’s Body Handles Nutrients (aka The Goldilocks Effect) by Doctor Ramey at David Ramey, D.V.M.
It’s Raining Lamprey! by Perrin Ireland at onEarth

Feeling Feverish—Do Anoles Fight Parasite Infestation with a Febrile Response? by Ellee Cook at Anole Annals



Doggy Morality in Mauritius by Cynthia L. Mills at Dog-Ma’s
Study confirms what scientists have been saying for decades: the sixth mass extinction is real and caused by us by Rhett A. Butler at Mongabay
Plague Killed A Colorado Teen. What Do You Need To Know? by Judy Stone at Forbes
The Social Construction of Evolutionary Biology by Barry X. Kuhle at This View of Life
New Jersey's Dinosaurs On A Jurassic Park Website? by Gary Vecchiarelli at Prehistoric Pub
New Jersey's Diplotomodon! by Gary Vecchiarelli at Prehistoric Pub
Is Africa facing its own 'vulture crisis'? by Jason Goldman at Earth Touch News
Uh-oh: One of the world’s worst invasive species just showed up in the United States by Rachel Feltman at Washington Post
People Get Seasonal Depression in the Summer, Too by Brian Handwerk at Smithsonian



Two Men Just Won $2.2 Million In Landmark Genetic Discrimination Lawsuit by Virginia Hughes at BuzzFeed
Island Rodents Take On Nightmarish Proportions by Robin Ann Smith at Duke Today
Sugar Was a Spice and Not Always so Nice by Layla Eplett at Food Matters
Ramón y Cajal and the Case for Drawing in Science by Amanda Montañez at SA Visual

You Won’t Think the Platypus Is So Cute if You Feel the Excruciating Pain of Its Venom by Megan Cartwright at Slate
Of Mice And Magnets by Michael Greshko at Inside Science
Model Could Help Counteract Poisoning from Popular Painkiller by Robin Ann Smith at Duke Today



Previously in this series:
FieldNotes: a view to spotted horses in the morning
FieldNotes: The Word For World is Blue (or is it Gold?)
FieldNotes: Golden Mean, polite middle-ground, and optimal numbers of legs.
FieldNotes: speeding up and slowing down time
FieldNotes: from Captain Ahab to Jeff Goldblum, chasing the giants
FieldNotes: this is not your grandparents' neuroscience!
FieldNotes: Brontosaurus in, Food Babe out.
FieldNotes: Rogue Microwave Ovens Call Home
FieldNotes: Let the sleeping apes lie
FieldNotes: one thing leads to another leads to another
FieldNotes: Seductive Allure of Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations
FieldNotes: do African horses do flehmen at the sight of Derby hats?
FieldNotes: How The Bird Got Its Beak
FieldNotes: When Snakes Had Legs...
FieldNotes: Only before the bicameral mind evolved could people fall for Bohannon's cheap stunts
FieldNotes: Water, fire, origin of life, origin of cooking.
FieldNotes: Jurassic World, and other strange animals...



Images: Drawing by Robert Krulwich, screenshots from Inside Out trailer and Jurassic World trailer.


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