I love the movies.  I love science.  I spent many formative years watching Joe Bob Briggs, Commander USA, the goofballs at Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and similar people who introduced and commented on the movies they were showing.

Consequently, I now can't watch a movie without making similar ratings comments as I watch the good, the bad, and the ugly of science in the movies.

Sexual reproduction is costly.

For starters, only half of the population can bear offspring so the other half has to work hard to make sure they're included in the future gene pool.

Yet there is a payoff beyond the sex jokes sure to follow that statement. Sexual reproduction allows the mixing of parental genomes to generate potentially beneficial new combinations of gene variants that had not previously coexisted on the same strand of DNA, or to separate beneficial mutations from detrimental ones. 

There was a period of time when hunters were the greatest conservationists.  Think President Teddy Roosevelt, who evangelized national parks and setting aside wilderness for the public.

Later, environmentalism became an occupation for urbanites and they distanced themselves from sportsmen and people who enjoyed nature - they even listed them as enemies, in the case of hunting and fishing. 

It was once believed that crazy ladies acquired a lot of cats. Then it was discovered that a lot of cats instead created crazy ladies; cat poop is laden with an infectious parasite known as Toxoplasma gondii, a protozoan that has recently caused toxoplasmosis epidemics in people. At first it was just schizophrenia in older women, but then broadened out to pregnant women and all people with immune deficiencies. 

Once any link is established some will connect it to obsessive-compulsive disorder and kids' trouble in school, so maybe things have gone overboard in blaming, but Toxoplasma gondii can still be a real concern. Each year in the United States, cats deposit about 1.2 million metric tons of feces into the environment.

Next-generation hydrogels can form synthetic scaffolds to support the formation of replacement tissues and organs in the emerging area of regenerative medicine.

Embedding peptides into the hydrogels stimulates the growth of essential microvascular networks to ensure a good blood supply.  A new paper describes the technology in which hydrogels functionalized with laminin-derived peptides were transplanted in a mouse cornea and were shown to support cell growth and blood vessel formation.

Tropical climates that allow for year-round farming have a tremendous economic advantage, even in the developing world but corn and soybean farmers in Mato Grosso, Brazil have a developed world problem;a 10 percent post-harvest loss, partially due to a lack of storage. 

A research project used Geographic Information System (GIS) software to map the coordinates of commercial, cooperative and private grain storage facilities in Mato Grosso. They focused on capacity greater than 50,000 metric tons, mapping the state's 2,143 registered warehouses. 

Our prehistoric close cousins, the Neandertals, were more similar than science used to think in a variety of ways.

And according to a new paper, they had something resembling modern speech and language, which can be traced back to the last common ancestor we shared with the Neandertals roughly half a million years ago.

Neanderthals have fascinated the academic world and the general public ever since their discovery almost 200 years ago. Initially thought to be sub-human brutes incapable of anything but the most primitive of grunts, they were later found to be a successful form of humanity inhabiting vast swathes of western Eurasia for several hundreds of thousands of years, during harsh ages and milder interglacial periods. 

As Egypt fights over new leadership, Israeli archaeologists have found evidence of an ancient ruler in northern Israel. 

At a site in Tel Hazor National Park, north of the Sea of Galilee, archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have unearthed part of a unique Sphinx belonging to one of the ancient pyramid-building pharaohs. The Sphinx was brought over from Egypt, with a hieroglyphic inscription between its front legs that bears the name of the Egyptian king Mycerinus, who ruled in the third millennium BCE, more than 4,000 years ago and was one of the builders of the famous Giza pyramids. 

Wildfires and their witch's brew of carbon-containing particles significantly degrade air quality, damage human and wildlife health, and interact with sunlight to affect climate.

Measurements taken during the 2011 Las Conchas fire near Los Alamos National Laboratory show that the actual carbon-containing particles emitted by fires are very different than those used in numerical models, providing the potential for inaccuracy in current climate-modeling results.

Thanks to a Facebook friend, I got to give a look today at a very interesting pair of graphs. The first one shows the number of researchers per million inhabitants divided by country, in a world map. The second shows the fraction of female researchers. The data comes from UNESCO, and is based on surveys dated 2011.