Friday, November 22, 2019 Science First the Worm Gets in the Bug’s Head. Then the Bug Drowns Itself. The mind-controlling parasites are “like a back-seat driver, but a bit more sinister.” An earwig and the mermithid worm that lived inside it. Credit...Haseeb Randhawa and Ken Miller By Veronique Greenwood Nov. 22, 2019 A few years back, Ryan Herbison, then a graduate student in parasitology at the University of Otago, painstakingly collected about 1,300 earwigs and more than 2,500 sandhoppers from gardens and a beach in New Zealand. Then, he dissected and examined the insides of their heads. This macabre scavenger hunt was in search of worms that lay coiled within some of the insects. The worms are parasites that force earwigs and sandhoppers to march into bodies of water, drowning themselves so the worms’ aquatic offspring can thrive.

Wednesday, December 4, 2019 The Fog of Imperialist Propaganda Review of the NYT's 'Science' There's an old Freudian theory that criminals subconsciously want to get caught and that this explains why they leave clues at the scene of their crime. One needn't be a Sherlock Holmes to detect a metaphor for the NYT's own propaganda in the "Science" article to the left. Here's the opinion of Joel Dvoskin, a clinical forensic and correctional psychologist: Question: Looking at some recent cases of self-incrimination, where the perpetrator flaunts their criminality, it seems unfathomable anyone would willingly shoot themselves in the foot. What’s the logic behind it? Answer: Some of it is braggadocio. Some of it has to do with wanting acceptance by criminal peers—that’s especially true with gangs, but not exclusively; it’s also true with juveniles. They think it gives them street cred. But as I often say…if you go to prison looking for evil geniuses, you’re going to be frustrated. Most people in prison are bad at life, and most are bad at crime. There’s a lot of reasons someone will do something stupid. One of the reasons is: They’re stupid. Yeah, you might say that.