Cinematography beautiful

I don’t know if I could watch a whole feature film like this, but it’s mighty pretty in two minutes-plus of full-screen viewing. And hey, just as I was wondering if there would be Joshua trees, there were Joshua trees.

Via The Awl.◼


Do you hear the people sing?

You guys, this is happening:


I can’t wait for Christmas.

(Hat tip to Dave Munger, on Facebook.)◼


Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: Making sense of evolving invaders

This week at the collaborative science blog Nothing in Biology Makes Sense, guest contributor Kathryn Turner discusses how evolutionary processes determine whether an introduced species becomes an invasive species.

First, most obviously, how is it that a species is able to come into a new environment that it is not adapted to, surrounded by new environmental conditions and foreign biological interactions, and thrive? Thrive so exaggeratedly, that it can out-compete and displace species which have been there for millennia, adapting precisely to those environmental conditions and biological interactions? How can an individual survive to propagate a population? How can any species accomplish this? Second, less obviously: why can’t more species do it? Humans transport animals and seeds (and spores and larvae, etc, etc) around all the time, but only 10% establish self-sustaining populations, and only 1% spread to new habitats, becoming potentially invasive; this is known as the ‘tens rule’ (Williamson 1993) – a funny ‘rule of thumb’ for which I could never quite figure out the math.

For the answers, or at least some ideas about possible answers, go read the whole thing.◼


Evolutionary psychology: A dialogue

Photo by C Simmons.









“I see,” said the Biologist.

















Via Bora Zivkovic: Today over a thousand people gathered in Newton, North Carolina, to protest reprehensible anti-gay remarks made by a local pastor. Which, good for them! But when you stage a protest against proposing to basically put gay people in concentration camps (or, let’s be fair: dude actually proposed just one big concentration camp), you’ve got to expect that there will be some counter-protesters. And you never know who you’ll meet counter-protesting a protest against a proposed homocaust:

Earlier in the day, one counter protester was caught off guard when a peacekeeper working with protest organizers to keep participants separated from counter protesters saw someone he recognized. The peacekeeper told [this reporter] that one of the counter protesters, a man in his mid-20s or early-30s, once hit on him at a local adult bookstore. The counter protester denied the accusation while holding a sign that condemned gays. The counter protester left the protest early. [Emphasis added.]

Way to break free of the stereotypes, counter protester dude! How does that line go? … Then they came for the lesbians and the queers, and I enthusiastically endorsed that idea, because no way am I into that sort of thing regardless of what you heard and anyway even if I was, speaking hypothetically, it was just some sinful experimentation in college and then many, many times again after college.


Science online, Proustian bargain edition

Fire ant: “Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.” Photo by AJC1.


Carlos DeLuna

Carlos DeLuna, wrongfully executed by the State of Texas in 1989. Photo via Columbia Human Rights Law Review.

I’ve been trying to come up with something profound to say about this ever since I first saw it on Slog, but I don’t know what more to add to the statement: in 1989, the State of Texas executed Carlos DeLuna for a murder he very clearly didn’t commit.

The Columbia Human Rights Law Review has devoted an entire issue—available online, in completion, with exhaustively detailed supporting information—to an investigative report on DeLuna’s case. At the Guardian, Ed Pilkington picks out the most important details.




What happened was: Carlos DeLuna was unfortunate enough to witness Carlos Hernandez attacking Wanda Lopez, and ran off. The police found him near the crime scene, hiding under a truck, and almost immediately confirmed that he matched witness descriptions of Hernandez. Having a suspect, the police barely conducted any further investigation into the murder. More from Pilkington:

Detectives failed to carry out or bungled basic forensic procedures that might have revealed information about the killer. No blood samples were collected and tested for the culprit’s blood type.

Fingerprinting was so badly handled that no useable fingerprints were taken. None of the items found on the floor of the Shamrock – a cigarette stub, chewing gum, a button, comb and beer cans – were forensically examined for saliva or blood.

There was no scraping of the victim’s fingernails for traces of the attacker’s skin. When Liebman and his students [the authors of the investigative report] studied digitally enhanced copies of crime scene photographs, they were amazed to find the footprint from a man’s shoe imprinted in a pool of Lopez’s blood on the floor – yet no effort was made to measure it.

People interviewed for the investigation even confirmed that Hernandez repeatedly confessed to the murder. But it was Carlos DeLuna who was executed by lethal injection on the 8th of December, 1989.

The U.S. legal system is, at the most fundamental level, people. People can get things wrong. When the legal system is able to punish people by killing them, that means that the legal system can kill the wrong person. And now, if you need an example of someone who was wrongfully put to death in our country, you have a name: Carlos DeLuna, sacrificed to our society’s insistence that we should be able to punish death with death.◼


Ecological complexity breeds evolutionary complication

Photo by futureatlas.

ResearchBlogging.orgCross-posted from Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!













Beech leaves—yum? Photo by Colin-47.




And, as Corrin et al. note,
















Science online, AC/DC edition

A moonwalk during the Apollo 11 mission. Photo by NASA.