Scientific American raises the alarming prospect that, much quicker than anyone expected, bluefin tuna is going the way of the dodo:

As European fishing fleets prepare to begin the two-month Mediterranean fishing season on Wednesday, WWF said its analysis showed the bluefin tuna that spawn — those aged four years and older — will have disappeared by 2012 at [...]

LiveScience sullies our image of chimpanzees as noble, natural creatures with evidence that these apes practice prostitution:

The primates’ food-for-sex barter occurs indirectly, over the course of weeks or months, with males seeming to accrue credit with the ladies by plying them with meat killed on a hunt.

“What people have been looking for before is an immediate exchange,” [Cristina] [...]

You might think flying is an impressive enough goal for any creature, but the Telegraph reveals new clues that dinosaurs may have evolved wings to attract mates:

Dr Robert Nudds, a biologist at the University of Manchester who carried out the research, said his work had raised the prospect that sexual selection played a bigger role in the evolution of [...]

ScienceNOW is watching perceptual experts sketch out the first map of a strange sensory hinterland – the perceptual space that lies between what you see what you feel:

Experiments with blind subjects, for example, have found that reading Braille by touch can trigger activity in the brain’s visual cortex…. But Moore and graduate student Talia Konkle wondered if the sight-touch [...]

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A partially polished ammonite fossil.

At one point in history, these guys ruled the world. A few million years ago, there were bajillions of varieties of nearly every size and shape imaginable… as long as what you’re imagining has a spiral in the middle. Although they look a lot like the chambered nautilus, their [...]

Oh, my.

I may have to cover this. You get the picture.

via Kung Fu Grippe.

New Scientist reports on an unusual perceptual quirk schizophrenia grants its victims – the ability to see through the tricky “hollow mask” optical illusion:

Telling the front from the back of a mask can be more difficult than it seems. Thanks to an effect called the hollow-mask illusion, the brain can have trouble deciding if the image is convex or [...]

BBC News reports on a new kind of observational satellite overhead. It’s not looking down at us – it’s feeling our weight:

As Goce “bumps” through Earth’s gravity field, the accelerometers will sense fantastically small disturbances – as small as one part in 10,000,000,000,000 of the gravity experienced at the Earth’s surface.

This exquisite measurement capability meant some very fragile [...]

Washington University in St. Louis has been looking at depressed people’s brains – specifically the “default mode network,” a series of connections that link our internal selves with what we perceive around us – and they’ve found that depressed brains are really not like other people’s brains:

The work suggests individuals with depression may not be able to “lose [...]