(via Too Many Cooks, Not Enough Fish. What’s The Solution? : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR)
Humans cultivate more than food, producing clothing, construction materials, fuel, drugs, and ornaments. A population of male spotted bowerbirds Ptilonorhynchus (Chlamydera) maculata uses fruits of Solanum ellipticum (Figure 1A), not as food but as important components of their sexual display [2,3]. Here, we show that males indirectly cultivate plants bearing these fruit — the first example of cultivation of a non-food item by a species other than humans.
— Current Biology - Male spotted bowerbirds propagate fruit for use in their sexual display
I Wanted to Predict Elections with Twitter and all I got was this Lousy Paper” — A Balanced Survey on Election Prediction using Twitter Data
Males of the spider Pisaura mirabilis offer prey items as nuptial gifts to females… Field data reveal that gift-carrying males are frequent in nature (40% of captured males), and that all gifts contain fresh arthropod prey. Gift mass was positively correlated with the longest diameter of the gift. Thus, males do not appear to ‘cheat’ by inflating their gifts with inedible items, air or loosely wrapped silk.
Any politician—Christian or otherwise—who uses the Christian scriptures to justify wanton neglect of natural resources needs to read the book they use as a weapon to defend their short-sighted policies.
— Santorum Obliquely Suggests Obama Worships Earth, Not God - The Daily Beast
Even free-ranging sharks have friends (or at least a social network.)
Experiment shows that art students prefer abstract art to monkey art in about two-third of the cases. Since the number is above 50%, some argue that abstract art is different and better than animal art. I compare this result with figure skating competitions, where on average 73% of judges prefer gold medalist to silver medalist. This means that the difference between abstract artists and animal artists is less than the difference between gold and silver medalists.
They found that 4 hours of exposure to a mixture composed largely of primary pollutants (nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, and 55 hydrocarbons) at environmentally relevant concentrations changed the expression of 19 genes, compared with 709 altered genes following similar exposure to a mixture of primary and secondary pollutants (including ozone, formaldehyde, and peroxyacetyl nitrate).
Facial composites made by combining individual faces are judged to be attractive, and more attractive than the majority of individual faces. The composites possess both symmetry and averageness of features. Facial averageness may reflect high individual protein heterozygosity and thus an array of proteins to which parasites must adapt.
— Human facial beauty: Averageness, symmetry, and parasite resistance
