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Drosophila can't catch a break. Even Nature, which never runs a press release about one of its studies without putting 'prestigious' in front of its name, fell prey to a glaring error regarding the little critter, as seen on the cover of Nature Methods.
The problem? The cover attached, presumably, to "Tools for Drosophila" article is not actually Drosophila.
If you happen to be in the San Francisco metropolitan area the week of August 16th, 2009 and can't get enough science, I'll be emcee'ing a symposium on communicating science to the public at the 90th Annual Meeting of the AAAS pacific region.
Here's a 15 minute video of Scientific Blogging featured writer Jane Poynter talking about her 2 years and 20 minutes in Biosphere 2, along with what she is doing to save Biosphere 1 (errrr, that would be Earth).
I was outside the target demographic of this dance (though I can moonwalk like no one's business) but if I were going to pick up a retro dance, this would be a cool one.
Darwin didn't miss much, I think we all agree, and came up with a lot given the limited science of his day. One thing he missed, that by this time tomorrow will be the source of outrageous titles from every schlock science publication in existence, was that sexual selection that goes on even after actual sex.
Confusing? It's not so difficult to understand. Some female critters are trampy and have sex with more than one guy, for example (what, you think other parts of the animal kingdom don't have Jenna Jameson?) so there's sperm competition but there are also other factors having to do with the internal workings of the female body (i.e. that magical place), so let's catalog a few of post-copulatory sexual selection's greatest hits:
When you go to New York City, to Central Park, to the American Museum of Natural History, to the Hayden Planetarium, to a seminar hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the entire cosmos, you might think it would be hard to figure out who 'the star' will be.