Well done to Becky who has just won the poster prize at the 2014 Scottish Conference on Animal Behaviour (SCAB) held in Edinburgh today. Nice one.

In more shocking but ultimately happier news, Dave is actually in the lab this week, doing an experiment. With wasps and everything.

While any of you reading this are probably firmly on-board with the reality of anthropogenic climate change, go here for the latest release from the AAAS.

http://whatweknow.aaas.org/

Pass it on.

This week’s paper of the week is a nice study just published in Animal Behaviour exploring observer biases in studies of animal behavior. Tuyttens et al clearly show that preconceptions can influence what observers think they see. The importance of “blind” studies therefore needs to be continually emphasized.

Tuyttens et al (2014) Animal Behaviour 90: 273-280

It’s World Book Day! So go and read a book!

Don’t tell anyone, but Dave’s bed-side book is not an august scientific tome at the moment, but rather a very entertaining book on the history of Mummy curses (Luckhurst 2012, OUP). Dave isn’t quite sure why he has got into Mummy stories over the last couple of years (=Rachel Weisz?), but Mummy stories and their social context is a fascinating intersection of fin-de-siècle science and superstition. A great book for curled up by the fire…

Many thanks to Jorge Cham of PhD Comics (http://phdcomics.com) for his wry, witty but wise talk here today about life in grad-school (i.e. doing a PhD) – much of which is also worryingly relevant for those us for whom our PhD days are but distant memories… (yeah, you never really become a grown-up). Here’s one cartoon for Emily, who is just about to submit…

http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1678

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Here is Becky’s Nasonia rap, at the end of her latest stand-up routine for the Bright Club. Similarity of those mentioned to anyone alive or dead is purely coincidental.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwG_MKeA-mc

I think I might have to become her agent instead of her supervisor…