New Scientist has just given me stress-induced palpitations with their finding that the more wives, the longer-lived the man:

After accounting for socioeconomic differences, men aged over 60 from 140 countries that practice polygamy to varying degrees lived on average 12% longer than men from 49 mostly monogamous nations, says Virpi Lummaa, an ecologist at the University of Sheffield, [...]

Bug-watchers at the 12th International Behavioral Ecology Congress have brought the world’s attention (and the attention of the fine bloggers at Greenupgrader.com) to a previously unknown species of spider. Unlike their carnivorous cousins, the Mexican Acacia Tree Jumping Spiders (which have the best Latin name I’ve seen, Bagheera kiplingi) prefer dining on salads. And their neighbors’ babies:

Villanova [...]

Dailytech.com is smiling (or is it just gas?) over the latest trick we’ve gotten E. coli to perform. Geneticists have altered the food-poisoning germ so that it excretes diesel fuel:

After much research and genetic modification, LS9 says it has used a variety of common sugar metabolic pathways to force E. Coli to convert virtually any sugar-containing substance in part [...]

The Spitzer Space Telescope being sent on its way aboard a huge, hot Delta rocket, as a honeybee might have seen it.

When Spitzer launched Monday, 25 August 2003 at 1:35:39 a.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, members of the Spitzer team were poised two miles away with an infrared camera. At that distance, the Delta [...]

If you like your food a little spicy, EurekAlert.org might whet your appetite in a crawly kind of way… because hot peppers owe everything to bugs:

The spiciness is a defense mechanism that some peppers develop to suppress a microbial fungus that invades through punctures made in the outer skin by insects. The fungus, from a large genus [...]

Wired burst bubble! Science-head say me no Neanderthal no how:

Scientists who sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal returned no evidence of ancestral interbreeding with our long-lost cousins.

That mild disappointment aside, the study, published today in Cell, is an impressive technical achievement.

National Geographic takes us to a lost world, hidden under Antarctic ice for 14 million years:

Researchers found the freeze-dried remains of mosses, algae, small crustaceans, and beetles in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, where glacial lakes once existed.

The site also contains a layer of potassium-rich volcanic ash, which can be precisely dated, allowing researchers to pinpoint for the first [...]

So much for rooftop turbines – unless you’re on a farm. A new study from the UK Carbon Trust, which appeared on the CleanTechnica.com blog, found that windmills do more harm than good in urban environments:

The Carbon Trust explains that small wind turbines require open, exposed locations that have high wind speeds. These locations are usually found [...]

While peeking at a Special Secret Magical Message Board, I came across this “Perspective” piece from Nature Reviews Neuroscience on magic. Specifically, it’s an overview penned by a motley crew of magicians, thieves and brain scientists (including James Randi and Teller, of Penn-and-) that demonstrates how techniques used by magicians (and pickpockets) could be very useful in the [...]