This week, however, high school student Ria Chhabra and colleagues published a paper in PLoS One reporting both greater longevity and increased egg-laying at all ages, in fruit flies fed various organic foods. It's not inconceivable that some conventionally-grown produce could be so poor, nutritionally, that it would reduce both lifespan and reproduction. But their data seem inconsistent with our hypothesis that organic-vs-conventional differences were mainly differences in toxins (synthetic in conventional, natural in organic) and that natural toxins mainly acted as environmental cues, switching physiology towards longevity at the expense of reproduction.

I'd like to see this experiment repeated by a different lab, however, before drawing firm conclusions. There are a couple of strange things in their data. First, as noted in the paper, survival curves for Drosophila are usually sigmoidal, whereas theirs are more linear. Also, their peak egg-laying rate was reportedly at an age of 1 day. Other studies I've seen show essentially no egg-laying that early, with peaks at day 5 or so. See this paper or this open-access one.

Stable isotope evidence of meat eating and hunting specialization in adult male chimpanzees "sex differences in food acquisition and consumption may have persisted throughout hominin evolution, rather than being a recent development"

New World cattle show ancestry from multiple independent domestication events "pre-Columbian introgression of genes from African cattle into southern Europe"

Key role for a glutathione transferase in multiple-herbicide resistance in grass weeds "When the black-grass A. myosuroides (Am) AmGSTF1 was expressed in Arabidopsis thaliana, the transgenic plants acquired resistance to multiple herbicides"

Potential shortfall of pyramided transgenic cotton for insect resistance management "results from 21 selection experiments with eight species of lepidopteran pests indicates that some cross-resistance typically occurs between Cry1A and Cry2A toxins."

The Upper Limb of Australopithecus sediba "use of the forelimb primarily for prehension and manipulation appears to arise later, likely with the emergence of Homo erectus" [There are several articles on A. sediba in this issue.]

Achieving the triple bottom line in the face of inherent trade-offs among social equity, economic return, and conservation "three very different case studies in California (United States), Raja Ampat (Indonesia), and the wider Coral Triangle region (Southeast Asia). We show that equity tends to trade off nonlinearly with the potential to achieve conservation objectives, such that similar conservation outcomes can be possible with greater equity, to a point."

Decreased water flowing from a forest amended with calcium silicate "An unexpected outcome of the Ca amendment was a change in watershed hydrology; annual evapotranspiration increased by 25%, 18%, and 19%, respectively, for the 3 y following treatment before returning to pretreatment levels. "

Responses of Mn2+ speciation in Deinococcus radiodurans and Escherichia coli to γ-radiation by advanced paramagnetic resonance "extreme radiation resistance of D. radiodurans cells cannot be attributed to SodA"