At the end of the month I will be embarking on a new career as a biology teacher. In a bid to try and get my students engaged in science outside of the class room and to help them see the bigger picture of science, i.e. biology is not just the curriculum you learn in school, I have put together a list of websites, youtube channels and podcasts that will broaden their horizons. I realised that this list might be of interest to other people who are teachers or just interested in science in general and would appreciate a signpost to some good content.

This list is more biology focused but it does include general science, as well as more pop culture stuff like Radiolab and Stuff You Should Know. I'm going to try and impress upon my students the ease of podcasts, they're a great tool for enjoying learning and can be listened to while on route to school, going for a run or cleaning your room (all situations in which I listen to them). I know that not every student will read watch or listen to my suggestions but if I can hook a few in then I'll have done my job!

Things to listen to or watch outside of class
 
To read:
 
Websites
IFL Science - http://www.iflscience.com/
The Conversation - http://theconversation.com/uk
BBC science - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science_and_environment
Guardian science - https://www.theguardian.com/uk/environment
Real Clear Science - http://www.realclearscience.com/
 
Blogs
Carl Zimmer - http://carlzimmer.com/
Ed Yong (Nat Geo) - http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/blog/not-exactly-rocket-science/
WIRED - http://www.wired.com/tag/science-blogs-2/
popsci.com - http://www.popsci.com/blog-network
Nature’s top blog list - http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060703/multimedia/50_science_blogs.html
 
To watch:
 
TED talks - https://www.ted.com/talks
TED science - https://www.youtube.com/user/TEDtalksDirector
Crash Course - https://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse
Interactive Biology - https://www.youtube.com/user/InteractiveBiology/
Armando Hasudungan - https://www.youtube.com/user/armandohasudungan
Animal Wonders - https://www.youtube.com/user/Anmlwndrs
Bozeman Biology - https://www.youtube.com/user/bozemanbiology
The Brain Scoop - https://www.youtube.com/user/thebrainscoop
Gross Science - https://www.youtube.com/user/grossscienceshow
Veritasium - https://www.youtube.com/user/1veritasium
 
To listen: (all available on itunes and overcast or directly downloadable)
 
The Infinite Monkey Cage - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00snr0w/episodes/downloads
60-second science - http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/60-second-science/
Science for the people - http://www.scienceforthepeople.ca/
Guardian Science Weekly - https://www.theguardian.com/science/series/science
The Story Collider - http://www.storycollider.org/
The Naked Scientists - http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/podcasts/naked-scientists/
Nature Podcasts - http://www.nature.com/nature/podcast/
 
Not always science but just great:
Radiolab - http://www.radiolab.org/
Stuff You Should Know - http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/

Here are some links to some interesting blog posts that I've read recently. They vary from the psychology of 'believing' in evolution to the language of birds. I think they're cool, so some other people might too!

Don't Believe in Evolution? Try Thinking Harder
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/06/29/418289762/don-t-believe-in-evolution-try-thinking-harder?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150629

Gentle Sex? Females Just As Feisty As Males Over Reproduction
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630270.300-gentle-sex-females-just-as-feisty-as-males-over-reproduction.html (behind a pay wall)

What Can Be Done to Make Sure That Wind Energy and Africa’s Vultures Co-exist
http://theconversation.com/what-can-be-done-to-make-sure-that-wind-energy-and-africas-vultures-co-exist-43677

Babbler Birds Use Primitive Language to Communicate With Meaning, Study Show
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-30/outback-babbler-birds-use-primitive-language-study-says/6582860

Just three cool papers that are worth a quick read:

Cunningham et al. (2015) Can behaviour buffer the impacts of climate change on an arid-zone bird? Ostrich 86: 119-126
Behavioural thermoregulation, particularly the use of cool microclimates, is one method by which organisms could avoid the worst effects of climate warming. However, retreat into cool microsites, e.g. shady vegetation or burrows, may carry important lost-opportunity costs. These could include reduced opportunity for foraging, breeding or territorial defence, each carrying implications for fitness. We investigated patterns of microclimate use and foraging behaviour by Southern Fiscals Lanius collaris in the Kalahari. We used Ivlev's electivity index to assess preference of breeding males for perch types with different thermal properties. We found that Southern Fiscals preferred to hunt from high, sunny perches at all times, except on hot afternoons (air temperature >35 °C), when they switched their preference to high, shaded perches. Black-bulb thermometers indicated shaded perches were always cooler than sunny perches, especially on hot afternoons. Therefore, Southern Fiscals could reduce thermoregulatory costs by switching foraging locations. However, Southern Fiscal foraging success rates were highest when hunting from sunny perches, and were reduced by c. 50% when hunting from shaded perches. Our data suggest that Southern Fiscals were making a trade-off on hot afternoons, compromising foraging intake in return for thermal benefits. We discuss potential costs and consequences of this trade-off under climate change. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2989/00306525.2015.1016469


Westrip & Bell (2015) Breaking down the species boundaries: selective pressures behind interspecific communication in vertebrates. Ethology DOI: 10.1111/eth.12379
Studying heterospecific communication provides an opportunity to examine the dynamics of cross-species social behaviour. It allows us to ask questions about the extent to which the transfer of information is adaptive or accidental and provides an empirically tractable context for manipulating relationships. To date, most studies of heterospecific communication have focussed on receivers. However, the selective pressures on signallers can be as important in determining the dynamics of interspecific communication. Here, we propose a simple framework for thinking about cross-species information transfer, which (i) considers whether information exchange is either accidental or adaptive and (ii) whether it is unidirectional or bidirectional. To clearly classify interactions, it is necessary to quantify all of the payoffs of interspecific communication to both signallers and receivers. This requires accurate characterisation of the currency influenced by cross-species communication (e.g. weight gain, foraging success, survival). However, quantifying the payoffs may be difficult, because each side may be benefiting via different currencies. To date, studies on heterospecific communication have focussed on only one dimension of a niche (usually antipredator or foraging signals). However, because niches are multidimensional, investigations should incorporate multiple aspects of a species’ niche, to get a better perspective on why we see certain patterns of information use between species.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eth.12379/abstract;jsessionid=27595B1F63B33763D53AC2405EBA6067.f03t03?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

Flower et al. (2015) Dual parasitism of fork-tailed drongos by African and Jacobin cuckoos. Ostrich 86: 1-2
Different species of brood parasitic birds, which lay their eggs in the nests of host foster-parents, rarely target the same host species population. We report brood parasitism of Fork-tailed Drongos Dicrurus adsimilis in the southern Kalahari Desert by both African Cuckoo Cuculus gularis and Jacobin Cuckoo Clamator jacobinus serratus. Drongos are the only known host for the African Cuckoo, and were more frequently parasitised by this species (21.8% nests). Nevertheless, parasitism rates suggest that in the Kalahari, drongos are also an important host for Jacobin Cuckoo (4.6% nests). Jacobin Cuckoos likely compete with African Cuckoos for drongo hosts, as exemplified by the occurrence of both African and Jacobin Cuckoo eggs in the same drongo clutch. The drongo's defensive adaptations to parasitism by African Cuckoos, including egg rejection, may also curtail parasitism by Jacobin Cuckoos. The extent of competition between these cuckoo species and whether they possess adaptations to prevent one another's access to drongo hosts remains to be explored.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2989/00306525.2015.1029032

Just a collection of random papers, theme issues and a blog that I thought looked pretty cool and that some people might find interesting.

First up, a paper about sexual conflict in a hemaphroditic species, plus it involves love darts! Snails have a really interesting mating system and this paper looks into how the costly behaviour of having love darts leads to conflict, sexual arms race and diversification of morphologies.

Kiruma & Chiba (2015) The direct cost of traumatic secretion transfer in hermaphroditic land snails: individuals stabbed with a love dart decrease lifetime fecundity. Proc R Soc B
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1804/20143063

Next up, a themed issue on the biological impacts of artificial light, put together by Gaston, Visser and Holker. Its in Philosophical Transactions and my favourite paper in it is by Dominoni & Partecke called 
"Does light pollution alter daylength? A test using light loggers on free-rannging European blackbirds (Turdus merula)"
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/370/1667.toc

A paper about duetting in wrens. Using playbacks the authors show that females preferentially sing duets with mates to ward off intruders over singing overlapping songs with the 'intruding' female - which they do in the absence of their mate singing.


Templeton et al. (2015) Female happy wrens select songs to cooperate with their mates rather than confront intruders. Proc R Soc B
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/1/20120863


Vocal duetting occurs in many taxa, but its function remains much-debated. Like species in which only one sex sings, duetting birds can use their song repertoires to signal aggression by singing song types that match those of territorial intruders. However, when pairs do not share specific combinations of songs (duet codes), individuals must choose to signal aggression by matching the same-sex rival, or commitment by replying appropriately to their mate. Here, we examined the song types used by female happy wrens (Pheugopedius felix) forced to make this decision in a playback experiment. We temporarily removed the male from the territory and then played songs from two loudspeakers to simulate an intruding female and the removed mate's response, using song types that the pair possessed but did not naturally combine into duets. Females were aggressive towards the female playback speaker, approaching it and overlapping the female playback songs, but nevertheless replied appropriately to their mate's songs instead of type matching the intruding female. This study indicates that females use song overlapping to signal aggression but use their vocal repertoires to create pair-specific duet codes with their mates, suggesting that duetting functions primarily to demonstrate pair commitment.



Lastly, a nice blog about sex ratios in bumble bees. Eusocial hymenoptera are fascinating, they have enthralled scientist for generations. Because of the asymmetric relatedness caused by haplodiploidy the conflicts and cooperation within these societies provide so many avenues for investigation and manipulation.


A little snippet from the blog: "Analysing my data I realised there were two types of colonies: those that quickly started to produce sexual individuals, and others that took much longer. The former invested much more in male production, whereas the latter mainly produced new queens. Hence, it appeared colonies adopted different strategies, and I hypothesised that both strategies could be equally successful, provided a population contains both."


https://blogs.royalsociety.org/publishing/sex-ratios-in-bumblebees-and-an-influential-experience/?utm_source=social_media&utm_medium=hootsuite&utm_campaign=standard--

This is my attempt at trying to address some of the common misconceptions that I regularly hear from friend, read in the newspapers or see on TV (including some documentaries by famous physicists) about evolution. I think they are important to address, because a lack of understand these aspects not only diminishes our understanding of an amazing concept that has changed the way we understand and look at the world, but also because it opens us up to the encroachment of creationism (which includes ID).

1.       "We’re the pinnacle" 

This misconception is based on the idea that evolution is a linear progression whose ‘purpose’ or ‘end goal’ is the development of the human species. This simply is not how the evolutionary process works, natural selection favours the individuals who are best able to survive and reproduce in the current environment. When environments change the goal posts are shifted and individuals with different characteristics will now survive and reproduce more. As we are all too aware with global warming, environments change and so the evolutionary goal posts are constantly changing. This means that there is never an end point in sight for the evolutionary process, just optimizing for what’s in front of it. A great example of this is the fact that lots of now ‘simple’ worm like species had ancestors that were fairly ‘complex’, the evolutionary goal posts shifted and the ‘simpler’ individuals did better than the more ‘complex’ ones.

2.       "it's just random"

In almost the polar opposite direction to the previous misconception is the one that it’s all just completely random. This misunderstanding has probably arisen due to the use of the word ‘random’ when describing how mutations occur. Mutations are a crucial aspect of evolution; they provide the variation in individuals on which natural selection can act and without it the great diversity of life would never have happened. Mutations are random in the sense that it’s not possible to predict when they will happen, where in the genome they will happen or if they are good or bad. What is not random is whether those mutations will make a difference to the evolution of that species. Most mutations are bad, they occur in genes in a way that makes them no longer work or have a negative effect on an individual’s ability to survive and reproduce, some mutations don’t do anything as they occur in non-coding areas of the genome (although we’re finding out more and more about these areas and they may be important), only a tiny fraction of mutations will result in an individual being better adapted to its environment. So the mutations are random but natural selection is not.

3.       "Species want to get taller" and "It's for the good of the species"

‘Giraffes are tall because they wanted to get taller to eat the leaves at the top of the tree.’ This misconception is from mixing up the end result of the evolutionary process with some sort of conscious decision on the part of the individuals that led up to that point. Firstly, giraffes have long necks for fighting not for eating leaves (although that’s unimportant here). Secondly, the ones with longer necks will be the ones that do have more offspring and there genes will be maintained in the population. But just because we can see the ‘end results’ of the evolutionary process, i.e. the species that exist today, and so can hypothesize and test the driving forces that have led to their current adaptation (ornaments, behaviours and abilities) does not mean that their ancestors were consciously trying to evolve them.

The phrase 'for the good of the species' is used because many people think that all members of the species are striving for the species to keep existing. Unfortunately this idealistic, utopian view of intraspecies harmony is not borne out by our observations of the natural world: infanticide, homicide and inter- and intra-group conflicts. Individuals will do best to maximize the number of their offspring, ensuring that their genes are passed on. Sometimes, due to ecological constraints, like availability of mates to breed with (and a few others), individuals will actually help others (almost always their closest relatives) to breed - cooperative breeding or eusociality. But these situations can always be explained by these individuals either doing the best of a bad job and helping their relatives to breed, kin selection, while they wait for a breeding position to open up for themselves.  

4.       “We’re Just constantly ‘eyeing’ up each other for mates”  or “I can’t help it, I’ve evolved to be this way”

 This is another misconception between intention, behaviour and the evolutionary process. A lot of human behaviour is driven by our unconscious, if we had to think about every single thing we did it would be crazy – I’d have to be thinking about every single muscular movement in my hand as I type rather than using muscle memory. Lots of studies have shown unconscious biases in behaviour that the individuals were not even aware of. Sexual preferences for members of the opposite sex fits easily into that, but it doesn’t mean that you’re some sort of sex drive beast. The humans subconscious is an area that we are only just beginning to understand, from why certain colour placebo pills work better than others to why men tip strippers who are on their period more than those who aren't. There are probably evolutionary reasons for these but they do not define us as individuals, understanding them empowers us as a species. It also does not mean that you can just blame bad behaviour on such things, we are highly conscious individuals and we can rationalise our behaviour and take responsibility for it.

5.       ‘If we evolved, why are there still chimps?’

Chimpanzees are not what humans evolved from, they are our closest relatives. Roughly 2 million years ago there was a species, probably more like modern chimpanzees than us but was not a modern chimpanzee – this is our common ancestor. This species went along two evolutionary trajectories that have living decedents today, one leading to humans and one to chimpanzees, both of which are different from this ancestral species. Humans have common ancestors with every living species on the planet, something that blows my mind, and these species are the points at which we diverged on the evolutionary tree.

This misconception is also influenced by people calling crocodiles ‘living fossils’. Modern crocodiles are very similar to ancient ones, but they are different, they have evolved. Some ancient crocodiles had long legs and could probably run very fast (modern ones can too but only short distances). Things do change over the course of millions of years, it’s just that some (like crocodiles) don’t change quite so much.

If this has either interested you or confused you then I recommend reading Richard Dawkins’ ‘The Ancestors Tale’. It’s a really complete and accessible way of understanding how evolution works and provides a myriad of examples that are used in most university course.

One of my friends (Dom Cram) has just had a paper come out in Functional Ecology. It's a really well designed experimental study looking at the effects of dominance and effort on oxidative stress in white-browed sparrow-weavers. His research found that dominant females, who work the hardest to provision young during the breeding season, suffered a large decline in antioxidant protection over the course of the breeding season. Antioxidants are the compounds that health professionals keep going gaga over in various 'super-foods', as they help to reduce free radicals which build up due to the cells natural processes and can damage DNA and thus potentially make individuals vulnerable to ageing and lots of other nasty things. So the study hints that individuals that work hard could be at risk of increased ageing and a variety of other future problems. The abstract and link are pasted at the end of the blog.

Dom has rightly received a fair amount of media attention for this piece of work, and rightly so. This is important, as the public need to know what their taxes are funding and how this work fits into our broader understanding of the world. He was even interviewed on BBC radio:

https://soundcloud.com/dom-cram/dom-bbc-radio-interview-sept2014

This coverage though has been very varied, even within the ams newspaper. The Telegraph, link pasted below, covered it well but for some unknown reason decided to lead with a picture of elephant seals.... even though the work was done on a small desert dwelling bird. They also lead with "Alpha males..", even though the abstract clearly states that males showed a decline but it wasn't related to rank, the main result was for females. Well it was a good attempt. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/11070219/Alpha-males-and-females-at-risk-of-ill-health-and-premature-ageing.html

Above is the reporting from the Times, and this again is pretty good, even has the correct species pictured (and a lovely comic). But if you read the scanned image below you'll see that some one else at the same news paper decided not only to get the species wrong but to link it massively to humans, a gross overstatement, but then also to Bertrand Russell, Francois Hollande and John Maynard Keynes. This is a prime example of awful reporting and exaggeration from what is a well respected newspaper, this is what lay people read and where the get their information. We need better reporting by people who actually understand science, so that the public is better educated and so able to help the government make better science and environmental policy decisions.

Here is the abstract:
Cram et al (2014) Oxidative status and social dominance in a wild cooperative breeder. Functional Ecology, DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.12317http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12317/abstract

1. Oxidative stress has been proposed as a key mediator of life-history trade-offs, yet the social factors that affect patterns of oxidative status amongst individuals in animal societies remain virtually unexplored.
2. This is important, as rank-related differences in reproductive effort in many social species have the potential to generate, or indeed arise from, differences in oxidative status across dominance classes.
3. Here, we examine rank-related variation in oxidative status before and after a lengthy breeding season in a wild cooperatively breeding bird with high reproductive skew, in the semi-arid zone of Southern Africa; the white-browed sparrow weaver (Plocepasser mahali).
4. Our findings reveal that prior to breeding, neither sex showed rank-related differences in markers of oxidative damage or antioxidant protection, suggesting that dominants' reproductive monopolies do not arise from superior pre-breeding oxidative status.
5. After breeding, however, females (who provision young at higher rates than males) suffered elevated oxidative damage, and dominant females (the only birds to lay and incubate eggs, and the primary nestling provisioners) experienced differential declines in antioxidant protection.
6. While males also showed reduced antioxidant capacity after breeding, this decline was not dependent on rank and not associated with elevated oxidative damage.
7. Our findings suggest that divisions of labour in animal societies can leave the hardest-working classes differentially exposed to oxidative stress, raising the possibility of hitherto unexplored impacts on health and ageing in social species.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.12317/abstract

So after finishing my PhD I went back the kalahari to help Tom Flower out with some cool work investigating deception tactics and learning in fork-tailed drongos. While I was there I also had a chance to help his honours student, Bruce, out with his research investigating the relationship between drongos and sociable weavers. The kalahari is full of cool inter-species interactions (I'll put a couple of papers below). Bruce's work has just been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society, I have put the abstract and a link to the paper below. The work was really fun to do and highlights how conflict and cooperation have to coexist in both and ecological and evolutionary setting, and that this can lead to cool things evolving.

Baigrie, Thompson & Flower (2014) Interspecific signalling between mutualists: food-thieving drongos use a cooperative sentinel call to manipulate foraging partners. Proc R Soc, 281:20141232
Interspecific communication is common in nature, particularly between mutualists. However, whether signals evolved for communication with other species, or are in fact conspecific signals eavesdropped upon by partners, is often unclear. Fork-tailed drongos (Dicrurus adsimilis) associate with mixed-species groups and often produce true alarms at predators, whereupon associating species flee to cover, but also false alarms to steal associating species' food (kleptoparasitism). Despite such deception, associating species respond to drongo non-alarm calls by increasing their foraging and decreasing vigilance. Yet, whether these calls represent interspecific sentinel signals remains unknown. We show that drongos produced a specific sentinel call when foraging with a common associate, the sociable weaver (Philetairus socius), but not when alone. Weavers increased their foraging and decreased vigilance when naturally associating with drongos, and in response to sentinel call playback. Further, drongos sentinel-called more often when weavers were moving, and weavers approached sentinel calls, suggesting a recruitment function. Finally, drongos sentinel-called when weavers fled following false alarms, thereby reducing disruption to weaver foraging time. Results therefore provide evidence of an ‘all clear’ signal that mitigates the cost of inaccurate communication. Our results suggest that drongos enhance exploitation of a foraging mutualist through coevolution of interspecific sentinel signals.
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1791/20141232.abstract

Other cool interspecies interactions:

Pied babblers and scimitarbills:
Ridley, Wiley & Thompson (2014) The ecological benefits of interceptive eavesdropping. Functional Ecology, 28: 197-205

Drongos and pied babblers:Flower (2011) Fork-tailed drongos use deceptive mimicked alarm calls to steal food. Proc R Soc, 278:1548-1555

A cool paper by Bell et al has just come out in Nature Communications (abstract and link below). The study uses a hormonal manipulation to investigate the evolution or reproductive suppression in cooperatively breeding meerkats. Similar work has been done on banded mongooses. The national press picked up this recent paper because it was on meerkats, who in the UK are Russian and compare car insurance prices (this statement isn't meant to detract from the quality of the research). However, the response of the public to this work has been a bit odd, read the comments on the bottom of the dailymail coverage. I think these comments highlight the publics lack of understanding of how science works. A large amount of the comments seems to say that this has been known for ages because it was on Meerkat Manor, and so thought the work pointless. But this work is new and novel, providing an experimental approach to testing the hypothesis of adaptive reproductive suppression. What the tv series reported was based on correlational data and theories, but this work has proved it experimentally. I just hope that these comments say more about dailymail readers than it does about the average persons understanding of science and how it relates to semi-fictional soap-opera-style documentaries.

Bell, Cant, Borgeaud, Thavarajah, Samson & Clutton-Brock (2014) Suppressing subordinate reproduction provides benefits to dominants in cooperative societies of meerkats. Nature Communications.
In many animal societies, a small proportion of dominant females monopolize reproduction by actively suppressing subordinates. Theory assumes that this is because subordinate reproduction depresses the fitness of dominants, yet the effect of subordinate reproduction on dominant behaviour and reproductive success has never been directly assessed. Here, we describe the consequences of experimentally preventing subordinate breeding in 12 groups of wild meerkats (Suricata suricatta) for three breeding attempts, using contraceptive injections. When subordinates are prevented from breeding, dominants are less aggressive towards subordinates and evict them less often, leading to a higher ratio of helpers to dependent pups, and increased provisioning of the dominant’s pups by subordinate females. When subordinate breeding is suppressed, dominants also show improved foraging efficiency, gain more weight during pregnancy and produce heavier pups, which grow faster. These results confirm the benefits of suppression to dominants, and help explain the evolution of singular breeding in vertebrate societies.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140722/ncomms5499/full/ncomms5499.html

and a link to that banded mongoose paper:
http://www.bandedmongoose.org/wp-content/uploads/Cant-et-al-2014-PNAS.pdf

Biology letters have just released a list of their most read papers from June of this year, not papers published in June but just those that were read the most in that month. I thought that it might be a good idea to skim these and pick out the ones that I thought sounded the most interesting/weird and just share the paper and a link to it. I was going to post the abstracts but then I got carried away and chose a fair few, and if you are like me then you get bored when reading long blog posts on the internet. I've also just put a little clarifier as to why I think the paper is cool.

So, in no particular order, my top top read papers (from Biology letter, in June 2014). In addition, by chance and not design, it's also a top 10!

1. I like signal theory and any research that shows deception is pretty cool:

Brown et al (2012) It pays to cheat: tactical deception in a cephalopod social signalling system, Biol. Lett. 8:729-732
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/8/5/729.full

2. Research on cooperation and conflict extends from intracellular to ecosystem levels, this is just a very unexpected area to find cooperation:

Pearcy et al (2014) Team swimming in ant spermatozoa. Biol. Lett. 10:20140308
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/6/20140308.full

3. Hugging trees makes you cool, enough said:


Briscoe et al (2014) Tree-hugging koalas demonstrate a novel thermoregulatory mechanism for arboreal mammals. Biol. Lett. 10:20140235http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/6/20140235.full

4. Work on mate choice in humans usually focuses on things like facial symmetry, height or smell, this work just seems to be very different (and again it looks at honesty in signalling):


Neave et al (2011) Male dance moves that catch a woman's eye. Biol. Lett. 7:221-224
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/7/2/221.full

5. Just an amazing title, but also interesting work:

Levy (2013) Monsters are people too. Biol. Lett. 9:20120850
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/1/20120850.full

6. An interesting study on how environmental factors can strongly shape behavioural and physiological traits that are associated with sexual selection and mate choice:

Zuk et al (2006) Silent night: adaptive disappearance of a sexual signal in a parasitized population of field crickets. Biol. Lett. 2:521-524
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/4/521.full

7. The results are not really a surprise, but it shows how easy it is to manipulate our emotions:

Blumstein et al (2010) Do film soundtracks contain nonlinear analogues to influence emotion? Biol. Lett. 751-754
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/6/6/751.full

8. I always like research that can span disciplines, and this work spans psychology, behavioural biology and conservation. The work helps to justify, not that it's really needed, conservation of green spaces:

Fuller et al (2007) Psychological benefits of greenspace increase with biodiversity. Biol. Lett. 3: 390-394
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/3/4/390.full

9. An evolutionary explanation for why your hands go wrinkly, who would not love this??

Kareklas et al (2013) Water-induced finger wrinkles improve handling of wet objects. Biol. Lett. 9:20120999
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/2/20120999.full

10. Preferential aggression towards kin, goes against most things I was taught as an undergrad and looks like a fruitful area of future research:

Dunn et al (2014) Higher aggression towards closer relatives by soldier larvae in a polyembryonic wasp. Biol. Lett. 10: 20140229
http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/5/20140229.full

Here is the link to the full list: http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/reports/most-read

I recently attended the annual Meerkat-Mongoose Meeting, organised by LARG, at the University of Cambridge. This small scale conference has been going for a number of years and allows researchers working on meerkats, banded mongoose, and other species at the Kuruman River Reserve and other random study species, to come together and talk about proposed future work and unpublished research. The atmosphere is great, very like a student conference, and allows a fairly informal environment for critical feedback. 
At this meeting a very different topic came up: a new educational book inspired by the work of the Banded Mongoose Project to inspire and educate children in Uganda and the UK. The project has brought out a book called 'Billy the Banded Mongoose', which you can buy or use (if you're a teacher) as an educational tool and the proceeds go to helping education in Uganda. Here is the link:
http://billythebandedmongoose.co.uk/

And here are some other links related to the Meerkat-Mongoose Meeting:
Kalahari Meerkat Project
Babbler Research
IEU at Zurich University