…in fruit flies that is: (oops link broke)

after mating, females still slept deeply at night, but ditched the usual siesta in favour of extra foraging and searching for places to lay her eggs,” he says. “This behaviour lasts for around eight days – and our research findings suggest that this change is not by choice.

And so the fruit fly is confirmed to be a prisoner of its own biology, like everybody. Article also contains this gem:

Fruit flies are a good model for looking at sleep behaviour in humans as they exhibit many of the hallmarks of mammalian sleep. For example they sleep deeply at night from which they’re difficult to rouse and they have a preferred sleeping posture. If kept awake through the night, they exhibit tiredness the next day; if fed caffeine, they stay awake, and they become drowsy if given antihistamines.

I find it difficult to avoid anthropomorphising here.

Anyway, aggregating weird science stories like this is the kind of thing that’s made us the #1 animal sex facts site on the web.

1. UK nuke waste a big-ass problem

2. Indian nuke plant spill

But remember, nuclear power is clean!

…for your patience as we’ve been experiencing long load times the past couple days (Fixed - Jim). We’ve got the hosting company working on it…

One improvement that has come of this: it used to be that if you went to gonzoscience.com, it would redirect you to gonzoscience.com/GonzoUSA. But now those urls have been switched, so you may wish to update your bookmarks. The URL of this page is now www.gonzoscience.com, and visitors will be redirected here from the old gonzoscience.com/GonzoUSA URL.

Thank you, and we hope your Thanksgiving was filled with weird science.

UPDATE: Still a few technical problems, as some links to other parts of the site now redirect to the front page. And if you have found us from the internet with a search, you may be thinking, “Where’s the article I was looking for?” Please use the search box in the sidebar, or the topics, to search for specific content until this glitch is fixed. Thank you.

As if Klingon wasn’t enough.

Jetman fail.

Now can we just move on and find Bigfoot please?

Article contains this tasty smackdown of the Hobbit skeptics:

“Attempts to dismiss the hobbits as pathological people have failed repeatedly because the medical diagnoses of dwarfing syndromes and microcephaly bear no resemblance to the unique anatomy of Homo floresiensis,” noted Dr. Baab.

Oh snap!

Free NIDA’s stranglehold on free scientific investigation.

NIDA has a government granted monopoly on the production of medical marijuana for research purposes. In the past, the institute has refused to supply marijuana to researchers who had obtained all other necessary federal permits.

Currently, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has a monopoly on the supply of research-grade marijuana, but no other Schedule I drug, that can be used in FDA-approved research.

…

MAPS has also been trying without success for almost four years to purchase 10 grams of marijuana from NIDA for research into the constituents of the vapor from marijuana vaporizers, a non-smoking drug delivery method that has already been used in one FDA-approved human study. ”

An article in Mother Jones magazine describes their crop as “brown, stems-and-seeds-laden, low-potency pot—what’s known on the streets as “schwag”"

You get the idea.

New study out says:

Their results showed a slow decline in megafauna that began about 15,000 years ago and appeared to last for about 1,000 years.

This discovery rules out one idea that the extinction might have been caused by an extraterrestrial object striking Earth 13,000 years ago.

Like that impact did them any favors.

As this somewhat boring article explains. Still, we exist at least in part to document these sorts of things.

“Physicians are quite divided about this,” says Joseph Stubbs, MD, an Albany, Ga., internist and president of the American College of Physicians.

David Mutch, MD, a St. Louis ob-gyn, says the recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force will not change his practice in any way. “It’s clearly economically driven and not patient care driven.”

Other doctors have taken a step back to study the science.

Something we’re in favor of.

…Now here’s a meaty essay on the matter I can sink my teeth into. Warning: partisan!

The race to land a wingsuit without a parachute, i.e. “direct human flight“.

More challenging of the dogmas please.

The fish were originally categorised separately, but an influential study in 1926 recognised only one valid species - Dipturus batis. This classification has been unchallenged since.

The 80-year error has ensured that fisheries have not been catching what they thought, explained Dr Dulvy, who is also co-chair of the World Conservation Union’s (IUCN) shark specialist group.

….Dr Dulvy added: “As far as we can tell, [humans have] not yet driven anything fully to extinction by over-fishing.”

But closing fast on the flapper skate (dipterus intermedia).

Some marine mammals not doing so well either I hear.

New research in planetary astronomy has significantly upped the estimate of the amount of oxygen in Europa’s global ocean:

At least three million tons of fishlike creatures could theoretically live and breathe on Europa, said study author Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

National Geographic even got an oceanographer to chime in:

“I’d be shocked if no life existed on Europa,” said Shank, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

taking the Gonzo Science position.

Contriving abiological origins for all phenomena just got a little bit trickier (cough cough Martian Meteorite cough cough).

Looks like they’re going to take a high-tech look at the handwritten notes of the Nixon meeting that spawned the 18-minute tape gap:

They will search for clues that incriminating pages are missing and try to reconstruct what Haldeman, a prolific note-taker on yellow legal pads, might have written on them.

Among the advanced tools for the task is electrostatic detection analysis. The technology is capable of detecting and highlighting indented images, such as those left on a sheet of paper when a pen has written on a sheet above it…. Techniques known as hyperspectral imaging and video spectral comparison also will be used to study the ink and look for hidden clues to missing material.

Don’t get me started about Nixon.

Effing religious whackjobs and their violent fantasies. They wouldn’t have stood for this crap for one second if the left had been publically trolling for Bush assassins back when there was an actual fascist in the White House. I agree with this dude in the Maddow interview - support Obama. He needs it, because the crazies want blood.

Alex Grey

Latest extreme animal sex fact for you perverts, about Dawson’s bees (via the BBC):

As a female emerges, the male bees turn on one another, competing intensely to get access to her.

Bundles of male bees form, with each trying to bite and sting another to death.

The result is mass murder, with whole generations of male bees wiping each other out to mate with females.

Click through for video.

A list of all our animal sex posts (including this one) here.

Kim Peek: The real Rain Man

Even though I knew the ending I found this very compelling.

0:56 : bird strike

4:05 : Captain Sully: Any ideas?  First Officer: Actually not.

A heartwarming story for the ages.

UPDATE: Both Cracked.com’s and Wikipedia’s telling of this altered-states story are also priceless as we chronicle here. -Jim

Raped an 8-year-old, going away for good. Hint for parents: pedophiles often seek positions of unquestionable morality and authority; don’t marry off your 8-year-olds to one even if threatened with eternal torment in hell.

UPDATE: In a related story, the members of the Texas Pedophile Cult are starting to get put away.

Via Wooster

Since this study found a non-thermal biological effect from cell phones and other wireless phones, it is clearly poorly designed. Just ask any physicist; what is this medical researcher trying to do, overturn quantum mechanics? Maybe medical papers should be submitted to physicists for review.

Alternatively, physicists might be bothered to learn a little biology.

Specifically the leatherback turtle:

Such preference is known by scientists as a “lateralised functional behaviour”, and it usually indicates that an animal’s brain function is also lateralised, with one side of the brain dominating control of certain tasks….

….While researchers have recently found differences in brain structure between left- and right-handed primates, with the left and right brain hemispheres having slight structural differences, there is no evidence as yet that the left and right sides of a turtle’s brain are different.

…Except for their lateralised functional behavior.

Anomalous supernova resists categorization, and since supernovas are thought to be so standard they can help measure cosmic distances,

…it raises questions as to whether type 1 supernovae are still useful as standard candles to measure cosmic distance

Man, can the assumptions of the cosmic distance scale (reflexively the cosmic age scale) take much more beating? As a reference we will link to our own book.

Down with the Big Bang.

Too static to cope with climate change-induced migration:

…Dr Bhagwat explained, the current system of having fixed nature reserves may need to be reconsidered.

“We have 12% of the Earth’s land surface covered in protected areas, but climate change is likely to push species out of their home ranges and out of reserves,” he added.

“So we need to look beyond reserves and create the conditions that allow the migration of species.”

Some good news in here about how coarse-grained studies “overestimate species risks,” but with the caveat that climate change is screwing things up and we’ll lose fewer species if we get out of the “nature reserve” mindset.

Nature: 0, Nurture: 1.

“Contrary to orthodox interpretations, these data support the importance of human infants’ crying for seeding language development.”

….Debbie Mills, a reader in developmental cognitive neuroscience at Bangor University, said: “This is really interesting because it suggests that they are producing sounds they have heard in the womb and that means learning and that it is not an innate behaviour.”

Orthodox interpretations wrong again?! Is this Bizarro World?

A hilarious skeptical takedown of homeopathy et al.

Even if you’re a homeopathy fan this video demonstrates why allopaths should maybe run the emergency room.
Seen first on Bayblab.

Adds to a short list of documented genital licking in raunchy animal kingdom sex:

Female bats often lick their mate’s penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male’s penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male’s penis during copulation and the duration of copulation.

The paper details various hypotheses to explain the behaviour including added lubrication and that old sawhorse, pair bonding. Swiped this from Bayblab which is quickly becoming a favorite science site around here.

Might want to think twice about picking up that can of soup:

Consumer Reports’ latest tests of canned foods, including soups, juice, tuna, and green beans, have found that almost all of the 19 name-brand foods tested contain measurable levels of Bisphenol A (BPA) […] which has been used for years in clear plastic bottles and food-can liners [and] has been restricted in Canada and some U.S. states and municipalities because it has been linked to a wide array of health effects including reproductive abnormalities, heightened risk of breast and prostate cancers, diabetes, and heart disease. […]  Several animal studies show adverse effects, such as abnormal reproductive development, at exposures of 2.4 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight per day, a dose that could be reached by a child eating one or a few servings daily or an adult daily diet that includes multiple servings of canned foods.