Tangled Bank #60 has a litany of great science writing for your perusal.

This is an interesting puzzle.  It’s a swallowtail butterfly with different wing colors on each side (left versus right, not top versus bottom).  PZ takes a stab at what might have caused the abnormality.

Here’s a great article about octopus intelligence, boredom, and interaction — including playtime.

“Gay stork couples at a Netherlands zoo are living up to the mythical nurturing qualities of the wading birds.”  One homosexual couple is raising a chick they adopted from what appears to have been an abandoned nest.  Watch the short video for the news report.

Philosophers’ Carnival #34 is available.

Since we don’t want to call it a civil war lest we admit America’s plan has utterly failed, did anyone notice the civilian death toll in Iraq jumped to 3,438 for July alone?  That “is a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and nearly double the toll in January. The rising numbers indicate that sectarian violence is spiraling out of control and seem to bolster an assertion that many senior Iraqi officials and American military analysts have been making in recent months: that the country is already embroiled in a civil war, not just slipping toward one, and that the American-led forces are caught between Sunni Arab guerrillas and Shiite militias.”  Gosh, we did a fine job of bringing democracy, prosperity, freedom, and security to that country.

A moment of monkey ice stick zen…

And there it is!  “Climate change is affecting the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes, and hurricane damage will likely continue to increase because of greenhouse warming, according to a new study. It provides for the first time a direct relationship between climate change and hurricane intensity, unlike other studies that have linked warmer oceans to a likely increase in the number of hurricanes.”

A backward sunspot foretells a “really big solar cycle” is beginning, quite possibly the most active in several decades.

And finally, I’m wondering why it is we still have no resolution to the anthrax attacks immediately following 9/11.  They were conducted using a strain of the bacteria from the US government (not insinuating a conspiracy; just that the Ames strain was originally created by USAMRIID before being disseminated to domestic and foreign laboratories).  Like the rest of the War on Terror™, we seem to have ignored the attack and the guarantee to find and stop terrorists.  In that this one was completely domestic, I wonder why our government didn’t think it worth pursuing.