Angry birds vs. robotic zombies. There's so much weirdness here, I'm not even sure where to begin. First, there's the jargon-filled opening sentence: "Signaling often involves complex suites of behaviors that incorporate different sensory modalities." The "sensory modality" in question here is visual, in that it involves a bird waving its wing around as part of a territorial dispute among sparrows. If this sounds like much ado about nothing, be aware the press release claims the sparrows in question will sometimes fight to the death.
But the real thing setting this paper apart is its technique: It took taxidermy sparrows and reanimated them with robotics to see how living sparrows would respond to them. According to the PR, "The live birds responded most aggressively to the invading, wing-waving robotic sparrow, which Anderson [the lead researcher] said she expected." Clearly, she has formed expectations about things I never expected to see happen.
There's no such thing as a generic conservative. It took an international team of researchers to crunch these numbers, but the conclusions are clear: areas of the country that tend to vote for conservative candidates don't buy as many generic products. The authors ascribe this to conservative tendencies themselves, which cause the buyers to favor established national brands. They support that argument by noting newly established brands also tend to fare poorly in these same areas.
The lead singer of King Missile was apparently a sea slug. King Missile, of course, being the source of the song "Detachable Penis" (which has a remarkably detailed Wikipedia entry). The paper that evoked memories of the song features an opening statement I find it hard to disagree with: "some simultaneous hermaphrodites exhibit bizarre mating behavior." But, by that point, the title of the paper had already given the game away: "Disposable penis and its replenishment in a simultaneous hermaphrodite."
The hermaphrodite in question, the nudibranch or sea slug, has both male and female sexual organs. And, when it mates, the external portion of its penis breaks off and gets left behind. But that's OK! There's more penis coiled up inside the slug, and it can be ready to have sex again in 24 hours. "No other animal is known to repeatedly copulate using such ‘disposable penes,’" note the authors. The authors note there's enough penis coiled up in there for three copulations, but the text I have access to doesn't specify what happens if the animal wants to mate a fourth time.
Scientific evidence that some cosmetics advertising is bullshit. It seems pretty obvious that a lot of advertising copy used by cosmetics companies is ridiculous. For whatever reason, companies have decided sounding scientific will move moisturizers, and the result is a mix of meaningless science-y-sounding terminology, sprinkled with some actual scientific terms used badly. So it was my pleasure to see some researchers had put a material commonly found in cosmetics to the test—and found it didn't work. Liposomes are small lipid sacs that can merge with cell membranes, carrying their contents inside the cell, which has apparently caused many cosmetics companies to start using them. But the authors used fluorescent microscopy to show liposomes can't make their way across the barrier of the skin, so they don't really do anything more than spreading the material on your skin would.
Mandating smaller package sizes do increase public health. If this were a regular article here on Ars, the subject of the regulation might be large bottles of soft drinks. But this is Weird Science, so the paper in question is looking at painkillers. Apparently, in the UK, paracetamol (sold in the US as Tylenol) was subject to regulation that reduced its pack size. As a result, paracetamol poisonings (which include suicide attempts) have dropped by 43 percent over the decade since, while the number of people who need a liver transplant due to overuse of the painkiller has plunged by 60 percent.
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