In a future far away, when I'm a successful parent, I'm going to plan a sinister 50's-themed camping trip to persuade my son to become an astronaut and my daughter to become a great housewife (by being able to read the encyclopedia)!

Video found at Women in Science, which was found at the Prelinger Archives.

Next time you're in the bookstore, do science a favor and reshelve a few books accordingly!

In the same subversive vein, don't be afraid to reshelve movies like "What the Bleep Do We Know" into the comedy section at Blockbuster!

I really enjoyed PZ's jab at the mass male extinction in Brian K. Vaughn's Y - The Last Man. Thanks to Biology in Science Fiction I also found the recent paper he references for the Butterfly study. The whole male genocide deal isn't a very realistic scenario but Vaughn does a pretty commendable job despite some minor scientific technicalities which should only irk the most Bio-wise of comic nerds.

Did I say comic nerds? Because I've been reading Y obsessively since my first year at Waterloo and I can't recommend it enough. Does that mean I hang out pressed against the glass at comic book stores tearin' up over rare Superman crossovers? No!

I can confirm that Y has no stereotypical comic standbys like super human x-ray vision at sexy wonder woman or twisted super-villain plots to blow up new york city. Thank goodness. In fact, I never read a comic other than the funny-pages before picking up Y, so trash Oprah's book club and start up the Jacks of Science comic club!

Bonus: Since the internet has devoured my soul long ago, here is the torrent of comics 1-53 from PirateBay. Suggesting that you go out and buy the comics would be pretty hypocritical of me!

(If you're unfamiliar about how to use torrents or read comics on computer, first grab a torrent application like uTorrent, install it. Then download the torrent file from the link above. Using uTorrent you can select to only download one or two issues at a time by the check boxes. Reading comics on computer is a bit weird, but if you have a scroll wheel on your mouse, you can get CDisplay to ease the reading because you just scroll through the pages and they are maximized to your screen size. Enjoy!)

Figure 1: The enemy of humanity.

An important and unsolved problem in biology revolves around the idea that "not all genomes are created equally". For example, liverworts (very simple plants) have genomes almost 16 times larger than humans. This extra DNA grants liverworts many unique powers including the ability to transform into a delicious chocolate cake and the power to direct large meteors into the Earth.

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I don't usually follow politics except when it relates to how much tuition I have to pay. Although, I was glad to see some political commentary in terms that even a layman like me can understand.

Thanks Reddit!

Ever since computers were intelligently designed they have been flirting with the concepts of evolution. I'm mainly referring to evolutionary computation here. If you don't believe me just watch youthful Richard Dawkins flirt up a computing storm in a BBC Horizon documentary from 1987 around the 14:27 and 26:46 (Don't forget to check out an introduction to the optical disk at 9:05). Actually, according to this random Wikipedia fact:

In the fifties, long before computers were used on a great scale, the idea to use Darwinian principles for automated problem solving originated.

So what you're probably wondering is that if computers and Darwinian principles have been flirting for so long, why don't they just marry each other? Well, according to my exhaustive research, I'm proud to say that they are engaged. It's pretty hush-hush right now. We don't often hear about the two together outside the field of artificial intelligence because Evolution has such strong Christian values. That means no sex until after marriage.

The whole situation is the epitome of daytime drama because computers aren't exactly faithful. Darwinian principles and computers have been dating since the 50's but computers were unsatisfied with the relationship. Things just got so monotonous, that in the 80's, computers started seeing Quantum Physics to secretly add some much needed uncertainty to life. But there are plenty of sites out there that discuss that classically forbidden relationship.

Don't get me wrong, Computers and the principles of Evolution get along great. They have achieved many great things together, see "The Hitchhikers Guide to Evolutionary Computation: Applications of Evolution Algorithms", so there's no question that they would make great parents. All they need is to resolve a few relationship issues, consecrate the marriage, and a little Barry White to welcome to the world an adorable baby child! A child that goes by the name of Evolvable Hardware.

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It's pretty jawesome that robots can play soccer and win a RoboCup for their efforts. In continuation of the future-swoon from my previous artificial intelligence post, it will definitely be the future when we can play robot teams at sports. The beauty is that if they got too good we could lower the difficulty setting! I can even picture the scandals now: performance enhancing CPU overclocking, etc.
But the RoboCup tournament organizers are shooting for a playable robot soccer team by 2050 so I guess I have some time to kill. So how about some nano-soccer under an optical microscope? That's totally doable! Check out this Swiss nano-soccer-bot scoring goals with a nanoball (microdisk) which also competed at RoboCup.

Originally found at OhGizmo and then here about RoboCup 2007.

Here at Jacks of Science we generally don't advocate the use of illicit substances, but if you're going to do it anyway, why not look into the science of reducing your harm and read the Harm Reduction Journal.

Harm Reduction Journal is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, online journal whose focus is prevalent patterns of psychoactive drug use, the public policies meant to control them, and the search for effective methods of reducing the adverse medical, public health, and social consequences associated with both drugs and drug policies.

Some of the many great highly accessed articles include:

Cannabis and tobacco smoke are not equally carcinogenic

Decreased respiratory symptoms in cannabis users who vaporize

You can even use some articles to support bad parenting skills...

A preliminary DTI study showing no brain structural change associated with adolescent cannabis use

And also improve them!

Safe storage of methadone in the home - an audit of the effectiveness of safety information giving

A Big Purple Haze Peace Dude goes out to Improbable Research for mentioning this journal! 4/20!

Whether you like it or not, your gut is host to over one-hundred trillion ooey-gooey microbes. That means that for every one cell in your body there are ten microbial cells livin' large in your intestines.

Luckily, these little guys perform a whole whack of great services for the body, such as the digestion of hard-to-break-down materials. But where exactly do these abdominal amigos come from? A recent article in PLoS Biology discusses research by Palmer et al. that aims to answer that question.

To explore the development of the microbial community found in the human gut, the researchers conducted DNA microarray analyses of fecal samples from babies. This is one of those rare and beautiful occasions where someone gets to take a dump in the lab for the glory of science.

Pooey-diapers aside, the researchers findings were far from fetid. They found striking variation in early microbial community composition between individuals, and suggested that this variation was attributable to differences in chance encounters with microbial species. Other interesting findings included twins (who presumably share the same environment) having similar gut-community profiles, and babies delivered by caesarean section having lower-than usual microbial diversity in their guts (which could be due to them bypassing the rich and fragrant microbial flora the vaginal canal).

For more on pooing in the lab, check out this story over at Everyday Scientist.