A group of researchers observing this Brazilian insect drama in the wild say it's the first time they've been able to prove scientifically that parasites essentially mind-control their hosts to ensure the parasites' survival.

According to a release from PLoS One:

Inside the caterpillar host, a cruel drama takes place: the eggs of the parasitoid hatch and the larvae feed on the body fluids of the host. The caterpillar continues feeding, moving and growing like its unparasitized brothers and sisters. When the parasitoid larvae are full-grown, they emerge together through the host's skin, and start pupating nearby. Unlike many other combinations of host and parasitoid, the host remains alive but displays spectacular changes in its behaviour: it stops feeding and remains close to the parasitoid pupae. Moreover, it defends the parasitoid pupae against approaching predators with violent head-swings.

The caterpillar dies soon after the adult parasitoids emerge from their pupae, so there can be no benefit whatsoever for the caterpillars . . . The research team found that, in the field, parasitoid pupae which were guarded by caterpillars suffered half as much predation as those which had no bodyguard. Hence, the behavioural changes of the host result in increased survival of the parasitoids.

In other words, this caterpillar is made to love those wasps so much that it will protect them at all costs, including its own life. Now imagine if these researchers decided to figure out whether this wasp behavior mod could be ported to the human brain. A squirt of wasp juice could make you a super soldier, willing to give your life to protect whatever your "parasite" might be.

Parasitoid Increases Survival of Its Pupae By Inducing Host to Fight Predators [PLoS One via Science Daily] (Thanks, Brian!)

A study in 2005 at Stanford showed that there is only one gene that controls whether a sticklefish will develop bony plates on its body. So clearly this gene got switched on after the lake was cleaned up. But why? According to PhysOrg:

Back when the lake was polluted, the transparency of its water was low, affording a range of vision only about 30 inches deep. The tainted, mucky water provided the sticklebacks with an opaque blanket of security against predators such as cutthroat trout, and so the fish needed little bony armor to keep them from being eaten by the trout.

In 1968, after the cleanup was complete, the lake's transparency reached a depth of 10 feet. Today, the water's clarity approaches 25 feet. Lacking the cover of darkness they once enjoyed, over the past 40 years about half of Lake Washington sticklebacks have evolved to become fully armored, with bony plates protecting their bodies from head to tail. For example, in the late '60s, only 6 percent of sticklebacks in Lake Washington were completely plated. Today, 49 percent are fully plated and 35 percent are partially plated, with about half of their bodies shielded in bony armor. This rapid, dramatic adaptation is actually an example of evolution in reverse, because the normal evolutionary tendency for freshwater sticklebacks runs toward less armor plating, not more.

"We propose that the most likely cause of this reverse evolution in the sticklebacks is from the higher levels of trout predation after the sudden increase in water transparency," said Peichel, whose Hutchinson Center lab has established the stickleback as a new model for studying complex genetic traits. By examining multifaceted traits in the fish, such as body type and behavior, Peichel and colleagues shed light on the genetic networks at play in other complex traits, such as cancer and other common human diseases.

The ability of the fish to quickly adapt to environmental changes such as increased predation by the cutthroat trout is due, Peichel believes, to their rich genetic variation. The sticklebacks in Lake Washington contain DNA from both marine (saltwater) fish, which tend to be fully plated, and freshwater sticklebacks, which tend to be low-plated. When environmental pressures called for increased plating, some of the fish had copies of genes that controlled for both low and full plating, and so natural selection favored the latter.

"Having a lot of genetic variation in the population means that if the environment changes, there may be some gene variant that does better in that new environment than in the previous one, and so nature selects for it. Genetic variation increases the chance of overall survival of the species," she said.

Researchers document rapid reverse-evolution [PhysOrg]

7. When one person displays a new and bizarre ability, that's the work of evolution, because survival of the fittest is making only the strongest genes survive. Actually, if there's only one person in the entire world who can shoot cherry-colored death rays out of his eyes, that's not evolution — that's a mutation. It's evolution if the cherry-eyebeam guy has a easier time mating with Famke Janssen than anyone else, and thus makes tons of babies, all of whom can do the red-eyeblast thing. Mutations are only the building blocks of evolution, not the result of evolution. Go back to school, Mohinder.

6. Evolution is puberty. In the X-Men, for some reason, bizarre powers always manifest themselves whenever they first start getting hair in new and unusual places. And it's always treated as though the person's development as an individual is a form of, or a manifestation of, evolution. It's like puberty goes hand in hand with the sudden emergence of weird new genes, and your changes as an individual is confused with the transformation of your whole species. I also love the idea that there's one X-gene, which somehow activates a whole range of powers, from heat-vision to being a chicken-man.

5. Creatures with totally different ancestors will end up looking sorta the same, just because. Biologist and science fiction author Joan Slonczewski says a big problem with most science fiction is that it depicts convergent evolution as happening all the time — that's why aliens look sort of human, and aliens and humans can inter-breed. In fact, divergent evolution is way, way more common than convergent evolution. Divergent evolution is when creatures who share a single ancestor — like, say, mammals — evolve to be very different from each other over time. You're not likely to get just one unique creature in an ecosystem, like the great worm in Dune. Instead, you're likely to get a diversity of creatures from one ancestor. Convergent evolution, when creatures with different ancestors evolve to be similar because they're filling a similar evolutionary niche, is much rarer. (An example of convergent evolution, says Slonczewski: birds, bats and flying fish.)

4. Your children will inherit your body-mods. Maybe the earliest evolutionary theorist was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) who believed in the idea of "soft inheritance," where you pass on your acquired characteristics to your kids. If your body adapts to circumstances during your life — for example, if a particular organ gets smaller because you use it less — then your children will inherit it. (That organ will be smaller in your kids.) In fact, only genetic changes are passed on. But that doesn't stop science fiction from presenting changes to a creature's body, or non-genetic adaptations that you make in the course of your life, as being heritable. (Lamarck's ideas are sometimes mischaracterized as, "if you lose a leg, you'll have one-legged children," but he wasn't that silly.) In David Cronenberg's 1979 classic The Brood, a cutting-edge psychotherapy causes patients to manifest their darkest emotions in their own bodies — and one transformed woman gives birth to monster children that she can control telepathically.

3. Humans could evolve overnight into a new species in just one generation. In Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, humans' junk DNA suddenly starts expressing, and certain people are strongly sexually attracted to each other. These chosen people's children, the ones who survive, are a radically different species from homo sapiens. And Bear shows how this is just like when homo sapiens suddenly sprung up overnight, nearly 200,000 years ago. The new breed of humans are super-intelligent and mega-awesome. But it's pretty unlikely that super-rapid evolution would happen within only one generation.

2. It's possible to de-evolve people with rayguns or whatnot. Because evolution is a straight line and always happens in totally predictable ways, it's also a reversible process. You just need the right "de-evolution" device, like in the totally radical movie Mario Bros., where Dennis Hopper's King Koopa, who turns anyone who opposes him into a primordial sludge. Or, in the Next Generation episode "Genesis," a mutated T-virus from whiner-in-chief Reg Barclay causes everybody on the ship to start devolving — including Captain Picard, who starts turning into a lemur/pygmy/marmoset hybrid. Because Picard's too multi-faceted a guy to devolve into just one type of creature. Something similar also happens in the Doctor Who episode "Ghost Light," where an evolution-doubting clergyman is somehow de-evolved into an ape.

(Which reminds me: How exactly did "Ghost Light"'s interplanetary explorer/surveyor character travel all the way across the galaxy to survey Earth, but manage to be unaware of evolution? Is Earth the only planet where creatures don't just stay the same forever?)

1. We can predict evolution and accelerate it with technobabble. Random weird things, like going really really fast, or getting exposed to weird radiation, or just eating some weird fish, will cause you to evolve 1,000,000 years into the future, like in that Voyager clip above. And then there's the totally AWESOME Voyager episode where the crew meets the long-distant descendants of Earth's dinosaurs, who are spacefaring and intelligent. Janeway deduces they're the great-great-great-great-grandkids of the dinos by asking the computer to predict dinosaur evolution millions of years ahead. Because, of course, evolution is completely predictable in a vacuum, and you don't need to know anything about enviornmental factors.

Today there are about 6.6 billion people on the planet and climbing fast (remember when we got to 6 billion...nine years ago??). It's hard to read the news and not come up with a laundry list of ways to destroy our civilization, if not all humanity.

So it's nice to know that humanity's a little more rugged than we thought. Here's what researchers from National Geographic Genographic Project had to say on the findings, which was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics:

Previous studies using mitochondrial DNA — which is passed down through mothers — have traced modern humans to a single ''mitochondrial Eve,'' who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

The migrations of humans out of Africa to populate the rest of the world appear to have begun about 60,000 years ago, but little has been known about humans between Eve and that dispersal.

The new study looks at the mitochondrial DNA of the Khoi and San people in South Africa which appear to have diverged from other people between 90,000 and 150,000 years ago.

The researchers led by Doron Behar of Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel and Saharon Rosset of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and Tel Aviv University concluded that humans separated into small populations prior to the Stone Age, when they came back together and began to increase in numbers and spread to other areas.

Eastern Africa experienced a series of severe droughts between 135,000 and 90,000 years ago and the researchers said this climatological shift may have contributed to the population changes, dividing into small, isolated groups which developed independently.

Paleontologist Meave Leakey, a Genographic adviser, commented: ''Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction.''

Source: Associated Press, via PhysOrg

Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers described how an identical population of Podarcis sicula lizards was split up across two separate islands — one was the original habitat — in the Adriatic Sea in 1971. When the researchers returned to the islands 36 years later, the lizards on the foreign island had bigger, wider heads, stronger bites, and had evolved a bizarre new set of muscles in the digestive tracts.

Obviously it would take a little longer for people. On average, a human generation lasts about 30 years, and in the lizard experiment the recorded changes happened over 30 generations. That means even here on Earth you might only have to go back to medieval times to find ancestors that were lot different-looking than us (not counting the effects major improvements in medicine, technology, and nutrition, have had on our bodies).

But back to the 12 Colonies example. Even assuming every civilization progresses at roughly the same rate, the PNAS paper says habitat and diet (which are almost certainly going to be different from planet to planet) played the biggest part in shaping the lizards. In that case, thousands of years (millions?) of isolation between the Capricans, Aerelons, Gemenons, and so on would make for some truly bizarre humanoid morphologies. But then again, they'd probably think we we're pretty ugly, too.

Source: PNAS, via Living the Scientist Life

These composite images, including data from the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array, give new insight into how stars can appear in a galaxy's backwoods. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer is an ultraviolet survey telescope. Its observations, shown here in blue and green, highlight the galaxy's farthest-flung clusters of young stars up to 140,000 light-years from its center. The Very Large Array observations show the radio emission in red. Images by NASA. [Galex]

Millions of humans are infected with Leptospirosis every year, and the new strain could be spreading without detection. If new strains are transmitted beyond the relatively isolated jungle area where they were found, a catastrophic global pandemic could result.

There is no vaccine for humans, and treatment usually requires multiple antibiotics. Joseph Vinetz, M.D. was studying Leptospirosis in the Amazon region of Peru on behalf of the UC San Diego Division of Infectious Diseases when he discovered several humans and rats carrying the new strain. Dr. Vinetz fears that Leptospira licerasiae may have infected hundreds of humans in the remote region. Photo by: CDC.

New Species Of Infectious Disease Found In Amazon. [Science Daily]

5. Gateway: Less a character than a plot device with two legs - although he was sitting down so often you could rarely tell - Gateway took the "silent man of mystery" role to all new levels during his time with the team, barely speaking but always somehow magically knowing whether to send the rest of the X-Men with his magical teleportation powers without having to be asked back when they lived in the Australian outback and pretended to be dead. Years after they moved back to the US, Gateway was revealed to be the omnipotent keeper of all human knowledge, and then he was killed. Because, apparently, all human knowledge didn't include "how to avoid being killed."

4. Thunderbird: A character so pointless that he himself pointed out how pointless he was in his third appearance, right before being blown up in an exploding aircraft. It was probably meant to be poignant proof that being a hero can sometimes mean that you get blown up, but in reality, all his death did was make fans realize that it's a bad idea to hang onto the outside of an aircraft when it's about to explode. Seriously, outside of his brother Warpath (Their parents liked to give interesting names to their children, apparently), no-one can even remember what Thunderbird's powers were without checking Wikipedia.

3. X-23: There are many plus points to Wolverine's cloned hooker daughter, but sadly none of them are for originality. Or, for that matter, for anything beyond the amusement factor of her being Wolverine's cloned hooker daughter. It's not enough that Marvel came up with the idea of Wolverine having a teenage female clone of himself hanging around, they also had to make her a prostitute catering to masochists in order to cater to the fanboys for whom fantasizing about fucking a teenage female clone of Wolverine just wasn't kinky enough.

2. Slipstream: With the 2001 first appearance of this character - along with his sister, who went under the superhero name "Lifeguard" - Norrin Radd was stripped of the title of "Only superhero whose gimmick is a surfboard". Yes, Slipstream followed in the footsteps and, well, slipstream, of the Silver Surfer with his "warp wave" teleportation powers that were triggered by the use of his special surfboard. Despite his father being the godfather of Australian organized crime (Yes, I don't know why Australia and lame teleporters seems to be a theme here, either) and his being half-alien, Slipstream nonetheless failed to set the world on fire and was depowered within five years of his first appearance.

1. Angel: Yes, I know he was one of the first X-Men and that he's been around for years, but still, you have to face it - Angel sucks. Handsome, rich, and gifted with giant wings that he used to strap to his body so that he could wear a suit in public, Warren Worthington III has long been one of the least interesting characters in the world of the X-Men. He was so dull, in fact, that even turning him blue and replacing his wings with razor-sharp metal ones failed to make him interesting because, let's face it, "I can fly!" really doesn't measure up to "I can shoot laser beams out my eyes" or "I can turn to organic steel and punch shit". The fact that he's still around today is either proof that the nostalgia of comic creators is incredibly strong or that Stan Lee has some wonderful royalty deal making sure that all of his creations stick around while he's still alive. If the X-Men truly are the next step of evolution, you'd think that Mother Nature could have come up with something better than sticking bird wings on a guy's back, after all.

From the earliest moments in the film, when we get the cheesy "epic voiceover" telling us that this is the "story of blue eyes" and some other mystical garbage, it's obvious that 10,000 BC is a bad ripoff of Apocalypto. Which is to say, it's the tale of a small-town hunter-gatherer boy whose woman is stolen by bad guys from the big city full of pyramids and priests with weird makeup and strange fingernails. And it pains me to say this, but Apocalypto is a freakin masterpiece of scientific accuracy compared to 10,000 BC. At least Apocalypto director Mel Gibson had his timescale right for the Mayan Empire.

In 10,000 BC, you've got Egyptian pyramids being built by guys using woolly mammoths. I mean, it's the goddamn ice age, and then our main character walks over a hill and suddenly he's in the Nile Valley of 2,000 BC? And these anachronistic bad guy Egyptians (from the ice age) have got ships, horseback riding, and freakin STEEL. Steel? C'mon, guys, you couldn't even consult Wikipedia? I mean, why not just call the movie 2,000 BC and make it about ancient Egypt? Or keep it in 10,000 BC and come up with some other kind of bad guys? Jeezus.

So anyway, our hero lives in some undefined ice age region hunting mammoths (pretty decent CGI mammoths by the way), seemingly in Europe but a mere few days' walk from Egypt. A band of guys on horseback come zooming through one day, steal a bunch of his clansmen, and take off in the direction of the aforementioned historically-inaccurate city. Did I mention that 10,000 BC was right around the time agriculture was being invented? And that the first cities — with no giant monuments — didn't exist until roughly 4,000 BC?

OK, look, I know it's annoying when people go to science fiction movies and brap loudly about how light speed wouldn't work like that, and monsters that big would be crushed by gravity. However, at least with that shit we have the excuse that we don't really know how FTL could work, and we aren't sure what life would be like on other planets. But what was going on in the world 10,000 years ago? We don't know every damn granular detail, but we do know there were no giant cities where woolly mammoths from the ice age helped build pyramids. I mean, the movie Ice Age is practically more accurate than this crap.

Plus there's a lot of tribal ooga-booga where white people with dreads (who are somehow in charge of the brown people) talk about great spirits and generally act like a cross between the bad parts of Burning Man and the bad parts of the new agey 1970s. On the plus side, there are some cool CGI pyramids and the main character is almost killed by a sabre tooth tiger.

My biggest fear is that a bunch of teachers will take their classes to see this movie to teach them about human history. Because, you know, it's educational. I can't decide if it's worse to propagate 10,000 BC as evolutionary theory, or to propagate intelligent design as a theory of evolution. I think it may be an even match in the end.

Seeds that spread on the wind in cities mostly wind up dead on the concrete, while seeds that fall usually find a spot to grow in the same street plots or concrete cracks where their parents grew. (You can see the two kinds of seeds at left.) Because seeds grew up so close to home, the plants evolved super quickly — sort of an urban Galapagos Islands effect. (One of the ways that Darwin first observed natural selection was on a trip past the tiny, isolated Galapagos Islands, each of which had evolved its own unique types of finches that interbred quickly and in isolation from finches on other islands.)

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the researchers' study today, noting:

The authors took Crepis sancta seeds from several locations in the city of Montpellier, France, and grew the plants in a greenhouse, observing what fraction of seeds produced were of the light, easily dispersed type. Compared to plants from the countryside, plants from urban patches consistently produced fewer light seeds. Based on a mathematical model of breeding, the researchers estimate that the current version of urban Crepis sancta took approximately 12 years to evolve. They report that plants in a fragmented urban setting thus become doubly isolated, as reduced seed dispersal would likely lower gene flow and hence chances of species survival.

Rapid evolution of C. sancta [PNAS]

University of Arizona researcher Bruce Tabashnik said:

What we're seeing is evolution in action. This is the first documented case of field-evolved resistance to a Bt crop.

The researchers write in their report that Bt cotton and Bt corn have been grown on more than 162 million hectares (400 million acres) worldwide since 1996, "generating one of the largest selections for insect resistance ever known."

Another example of natural selection working this fast can be seen among elephants, who were hunted for their ivory tusks in the ninteenth and twentieth centuries. Over the course of a century, a "tuskless" mutation in a few elephants spread across the population like wildfire. While only 1% of elephants were born without tusks in 1930, in 1998 15% of female and 9% of male elephants were. Image via USDA-Agricultural Research Service.

First documented case of pest resistence to biotech cotton [Eurekalert]

We have all sorts of ideas we are exploring. And there's plenty of joking around about what Heroes should NOT become. Our head of digital entertainment teases Tim Kring about "Heroes on Ice" (with all due respect to figure skaters).

With the show off air for the foreseeable future, Heroes: Evolutions offers the only chance for fans to interact with their favorite characters... and for those characters to interact back. Says Tolerico:

Masi Oka writes and creates all of the Hiro blog entries himself. I put together the Drucker postcard code and our lead designer (Markus Hagen) created the artwork and flash file. The games and riddles for Heroes Evolutions are developed by our in-house team and the Heroes Transmedia team working together with the show writers to help guide us and keep us within the show's mythology... We miss our show writers and hope the strike is settled soon. We are working to develop pieces that are interesting to the fans, but with no new episodes these are different stories. Fortunately the tapestry of Heroes provides us with many different places to "play."

Joe Tolerico [Heroes Wiki.com]

Write the researchers:

Overall, our results suggest that the ability to exhibit striking changes in colour evolved as a strategy to facilitate social signalling and not, as popularly believed, camouflage.

For evo-geeks, that means the chameleon's special power of color-changing is primarily the result of sexual selection, not natural selection. And it's further proof that animal communication is far more ubiquitous than we ever realized. Not only are chameleons communicating, but their need to exchange information with each other is driving their evolution. Image by Jerome Delay/AP.

Selection for Social Signalling Drives the Evolution of Chameleon Colour Change [PLoS Biology]

Same technique: just add a gene (from jellyfish) for fluorescence to your favorite cuddy creature of choice and presto! Instant cute glowingness. And no, despite what the researchers say, there really isn't any good "medical" or "scientific" reason for doing this. It just looks cool. Photos via Eduardo Kac and AFP.

Sorry, we're not becoming post-human yet. But that is probably in the cards. One of the authors of the study, John Hawks, is an anthropology professor at the University of Wisconsin and a prolific blogger. He's writing a series of helpful posts to go with the scientific article, explaining everything you might want to know about accelerating evolution.

So what's changed most over the last 40,000 years? Humans' skeletal structures, skin color, teeth, disease resistance, and ability to metabolize certain foods (like milk). So if history is any guide, our entire bodily structures and phenotypes, as well as what we can eat, are still changing. With the help of a little genetic engineering, we might be six-limbed glass-eaters before you know it. Image courtesy of AFP/Getty Images.

Selection Spurred Recent Evolution [New York Times]

Says Brendan Tobin of the Irish Center for Human Rights, an author of the report:

Failure to outlaw reproductive cloning means it is just a matter of time until cloned individuals share the planet. If failure to compromise continues, the world community must accept responsibility and ensure that any cloned individual receives full human rights protection. It will also need to embark on an extensive awareness building and sensitivity program to ensure that the wider society treats clones with respect and ensure they are protected against prejudice, abuse or discrimination.

Most of the report urges the international community to set up better laws against human reproductive cloning, essentially threatening them with the stick of having to take sensitivity training to deal with clone co-workers. I guess the worst thing that the UN can imagine is another minority group demanding its rights. They also talk about the two main arguments against human reproductive cloning: religious concerns, and fear of commoditizing human life. (They leave out what to me seems like the most important issue, which is that making a human clone is essentially to experiment on a human subject without permission.)

No matter how you slice it, the UN document is pretty damn anti-clone. For a less clone-phobic legal analysis of clone rights, check out law professor Kerry MacIntosh's book Illegal Beings: Human Clones and the Law (Cambridge University Press). At least she offers several legal methods to assert civil rights for clones. Getty Image by Martin Oeser.

Is Human Cloning Inevitable: Future Options for UN Governance [UN University]

Human evolution will reach its peak in about the year 3000. By then, sexual selection will have bred men into tall, handsome studs with deep voices, square jaws and substantial penises. Their female counterparts will have smooth, hairless skin, glossy hair, large eyes and perky breasts, says Curry. But after that, it's all downhill.

Curry also claims within 100,000 years the human race will divide into two species, just like in The Time Machine. Over-reliance on technology will turn some humans into sensitive New Age wimps, while others will become dumb servants. It's just the sort of crap you should expect when the field of genetics is overrun by racist dickwads like James Watson. Image by high_me

Scientist: Human Race May Split In Two In Far Future [Fox News]

According to Times reporter Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, who has the interview on tape:

He says that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because "there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level". He writes that "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so".

Should we let this guy's foolish remarks undermine our admiration for the science he pioneered? Yes. There has always been a strong element of racism and sexism in the study of genetics, a field whose history is deeply bound up with the eugenics movement (which was, after all, a "scientific" movement). Leaders in the field like Steven Pinker and E.O. Wilson routinely make comments about how people are "hardwired" to behave in certain ways based on their genetic heritage, which is often linked to their racial backgrounds or sex. Genomics and evolutionary biology studies on the genetic inferiority of female intelligence are what motivated former Harvard President Larry Summers to claim that there are so few women in science because we just aren't smart enough. Back in 2003, I saw Harvard professor Steven Pinker give a lecture at MIT where he speculated that perhaps Jews are just genetically more intelligent than other groups.

These guys give science a bad name, and they derail good work that might get done in their fields by bringing sex and race bias into the lab. I'm glad that Watson has finally gotten a good spanking for a lifetime of asswipage. Too bad it didn't happen earlier.

Here's the article from the London Times where Watson stuck his foot in his mouth for the last time.

Says Moron:

This implies that ant workers adjust their threshold for engaging in risk foraging according to their life expectancy.

Knowing when you'll die sounds like a nightmare, but ants have managed to turn it into functional altruism. Knowing when it will die lets each ant make a rational decision to face danger that could benefit the rest of the nest. After all, it's going to die pretty soon anyway, so it might as well do a bunch of potentially fatal things beforehand. Image by Bill Hails.

A Story of Ants, Ageing, and Altruism [via The Independent]

More importantly, The Bionic Woman is about Jamie's hot-rodded female body—there's no room for a male cyborg. Jamie is spied upon by uber-daddy Jonas Bledsoe, who steps in when she's about to have hot bathroom sex with Mr. Right Now. When Jamie complains, Bledsoe informs her that "those legs, that arm, that ear and that eye belong to me." She is a very expensive possession, a trophy wife in the way no male bot could ever be. Jamie's body is no longer her own—she belongs to the Berkut Group. Similarly, in a moment of post-coital truth telling, original bionic woman Sarah Corviss tells Jay, "I think someone hacked me," when he asks why she killed 14 agents. No matter how much power Sarah and Jamie pack, they are ultimately at the mercy of higher, most likely male, forces. Besides, watching two fembots fight = hot, which is probably why last week's footage of Sarah and Jamie is recycled. We also get to see Jamie fight a Bad Guy. She knocks him out—but ultimately must be rescued by her supervisor, Antonio.

The episode's big moment comes when Jamie, after saving a woman from committing suicide, realizes she needs a Larger Purpose in life. She tells Bledsoe she'll help save civilization as we know it, but she has to be home by 7:00 every night, can't work weekends, and needs Becca added to the company health plan. If you need any further evidence that this show is indeed a fantasy, Jamie's new boss agrees to her demands without blinking an eye.

Being possessed/getting saved by men and trying to be a good mom to her annoying little sister prove that despite the ability to run 60 mph or more, shatter brick with her arm, and bend steel with her grip, Jamie is really just a girl at heart. After all, she only breaks Mr. Right Now's rib by mistake. And her feminine nature means she loves gossip—something manly men find annoying. "I'm not a big fan of eavesdroppers," says Bledsoe when he catches Jamie in the act, no doubt forgetting that he's the dope that gave her a bionic ear in the first place.

After doing her bit to save the world (or at least select American cities) from a rogue organization trying to unleash a deadly toxic attack, supermom Jamie makes it to Becca's talent show on time, where little sis is performing a number from "Annie Get Your Gun." Which number remains unknown, as NBC in its marketing wisdom plays another song over the scene. Nevertheless, all is comfy and cozy heading into next week.

Famous Names: Terry Gilliam (Director); Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Madeline Stowe (Cast).

Crunchy Goodness: 4

Stunt Casting: Brad Pitt over-plays his role as a wild-eyed nutbar who Willis keeps running into; surprisingly, it earned him an Oscar nomination. ...

Bang for Your Buck: Gilliam's vision of a dead tomorrow — some of the most exciting pure visual work he's given us since Brazil.

Life Lesson: Trust anyone you meet in an insane asylum implicitly.

Peter Stack's San Francisco Chronicle Review

Famous Names: Charlton Heston, Roddy MacDowall, Kim Hunter, James Whitmore (Cast)

Crunchy Goodness: 3

Sequels: Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Battle for the Planet of the Apes — plus two TV series, Planet of the Apes and the animated Return to the Planet of the Apes, and Tim Burton's dreadful 2002 re-make.

Bang for Your Buck: The extensive, expensive ape make-up — representing nearly 20% of the film's entire budget.

Deadliest Spoiler: It WAS Earth all along!

An overview of the entire Apes Saga: Those Damn Dirty Apes! by Anthony Leong

Famous names: Andrew Niccol, Uma Thurman, Ethan Hawke

Crunchy goodness: 3

Design breakthrough: Filmed at futuristic-looking malls and factory farms near Los Angeles and Marin County, Gattaca offered a fascinating glimpse of city life after the genome has been throughly hacked.

Life lesson: As we always suspected, Ethan Hawke is a genetic defective.

Elevator pitch: It's like 1984 - with genetics!

Gattaca, early draft, by Andrew M Niccol

Famous names: William Hurt

Crunchy goodness: 2

Ripoff: The thoroughly underrated Super Mario Bros. movie also plays with the idea of de-evolution. If you recall, the evil dinosaur leader (Dennis Hopper) in that flick defeats his enemies by using a de-evolution gun to turn them into moss.

Most painfully dated moment: The "bad trip" sequences with Satan permanently mark this as a movie from the era when Meatloaf and Black Sabbath ruled.

Memorable product tie-in: For reasons that only the Me Generation can understand, this movie created a brief craze for sensory deprivation tanks. For a few years, urbanites could find salons where they'd rent you time in one of these stinky black boxes full of salinated water, just so you could pretend you were one with the universe.

Look What I Found In My Brain! - Movie Review: Altered States