Yesterday, the entire world changed noticeably as the media, accompanied by some scientists, unveiled a stunning fossilised primate. The creature has been named Darwinius masillae, but also goes by Ida, the Link, the Chosen One and She Who Will Save Us All.

The new fossil is remarkably complete and well-preserved, although the media glossed over these facts in favour of the creature’s ability to cure swine flu. Ida was hailed as a “missing link” in human evolution, beautifully illustrating our transition from leaping about in trees to rampant mass-media sensationalism.

Speaking to a group of international reporters, the scientists who discovered Ida described the animal in painstaking detail to the sound of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries played from 50-foot speakers. As a barrage of fireworks launched in the background, one journalist said, “The release of 30 doves just at the right moment really helped to drive home the unique paleoecological perspective that Ida provides.”

Evolutionary biologist Stephen Wilton added, “Ida has been waiting for us for 47 million years so I’m grateful that the publication of the paper wasn’t rushed and that the whole thing didn’t turn into some sort of media circus. You never know when that might happen.”

Businesses around the world are also hoping that demand for Ida merchandise will stimulate an ailing global economy out of recession. Retailer Bud Hornblower said, “We’re seeing a massive spike in demand for fainting couches as ordinary lay people fail to cope with the total change brought on by this small, weird-lookin’ monkey thing.”

Scientists and people who actually know a thing or two about evolution warned of hype and exaggeration but were forced to abandon their reason and critical analysis in the face of incontrovertible speculation that Ida could convert base metals into gold and has already led to the invention of flying cars.

“I didn’t believe it at first,” said Professor Adam Templesmith from the University of Slough. “When I read the press release about a fossil that would change everything, I naturally assumed that it was some sort of poorly conceived and overly exaggerated PR claim. But now that the total reversal of climate change is underway, I’m forced to reconsider my prejudices.”

Already the star of her own website, book and documentary, little Ida will soon have her own action figure, underwear range, three-album deal and seat in Parliament. “Ida’s brand is a hot as Obama’s right now,” said Don Chumleigh, market analyst. “I’m just sad that her fossilised hand isn’t doing that fist-bump thing.”

Recreated through CGI, Ida is also set to play a pivotal role in the climax of the new Harry Potter film, where she will be voiced by Keira Knightley and wield a powerful ‘Changus Totalus’ spell. Special effects will also be used to insert Ida into previous seasons of the Wire and past G8 summits.

Around the world, signs that everything has changed have already begun to appear. Jeanette Gould from Stoke-on-Trent was shocked to discover the outline of Darwinius emblazoned on her morning toast. “Well, it ruined breakfast,” said Ms Gould, failing to appreciate the detail of the creature’s stomach contents outlined in bread crumbs. “I couldn’t very well spread raspberry jam over the direct ancestor of my children, could I?”

For actual details about Ida, look no further than excellent takes from Brian Switek, PZ and Carl Zimmer. Brian in particular has serious reservations about the paper itself. I’m too weary to tackle it.

While the rapid expansion of human cities has been detrimental for most animals, some have found ways of exploiting these brave new worlds and learned to live with their prolific inhabitants. The Northern mockingbird is one such species. It’s very common in cities all over America’s east coast, where it frequently spends time around humans. But Douglas Levey from the University of Florida has found that its interactions with us are more complex than anyone would have guessed. 

The mockingbird has the remarkable ability to tell the difference between individual humans, regardless of the clothes they wear. After less than a minute, they can tell one person from another and adjust their responses according to the threat they pose to its nest. This ability suggests that these birds are both intelligent and very flexible in their behaviour – two traits that must surely stand them in good stead in the urban jungle.

It obviously benefits an animal to be able to distinguish between threatening and harmless species, but discriminating between individuals of the same species is a much more difficult task – just think about how difficult you would find it to tell the difference between two mockingbirds by eye.

Levey worked with 24 pairs of mockingbirds that had taken up residence on the university’s campus. Hundreds of people walk within five metres of their nests every day and elicit absolutely no reaction. To simulate a greater threat, Levey asked one of his colleagues to approach the nests of birds with fresh clutches, and touch their rim for 15 seconds. When faced with such intrusion, mockingbirds will typically react by rallying from the nest, making alarm calls and diving aggressively at the trespasser.

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For the longest time, people believed that the world’s largest lizard, the Komodo dragon, killed its prey with a dirty mouth. Strands of rotting flesh trapped in its teeth harbour thriving colonies of bacteria and when the dragon bites an animal, these microbes flood into the wound and eventually cause blood poisoning.

But that theory was contested in 2005 when Bryan Fry from the University of Melbourne discovered that a close relative, the lace monitor, has venom glands in its mouth. The discovery made Fry suspect that Komodo dragons also poison their prey and he has just confirmed that in a whirlwind of a paper, which details the dragon’s “sophisticated combined-arsenal killing apparatus”.

By putting a virtual dragon skull through a digital crash-test, Fry showed that its bite is relatively weak for a predator of its size – instead it’s adapted to resist strong pulling forces. This is a hunter built to inflict massive wounds through a “grip and rip” style that involves biting lightly but tearing ferociously.

The wounds provide a large open area for the dragon to inject its venom and Fry unquestionably showed that the dragons poison their prey. By placing the head of a terminally ill dragon in an MRI scanner, he managed to isolate the venom glands, which turn out to be more structurally complex than those of any other snake or lizard. He even managed to analyse a sample of venom, which is loaded with toxins that prevent blood from clotting and induce shock.

And as the icing on the cake, Fry concluded that Varanus prisca, a extinct close relative of the Komodo dragon probably also had venom glands. Also known as Megalania, V.prisca was three times the size of the Komodo dragon, making it (to our knowledge) the largest venomous animal to have ever lived.

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Say the word iceberg, and most people are likely to free-associate it with ‘Titanic’. Thanks to James Cameron (and, well, history too), the iceberg now has a reputation as an cold murderous force of nature, sinking both ships and Leonardo DiCaprio. But a new study shows that icebergs are not harbingers of death but hotspots of life.

In the late 1980s, about 200,000 icebergs roamed across the Southern Ocean. They range in size from puny ‘growlers’, less than a metre long, to massive blocks of ice, larger than some small countries.

They may be inert frozen lumps, but icebergs are secretly in the business of nutrient-trafficking. As the ice around Antarctica melts in the face of global warming, some parts break free from the parent continent and strike out on their own. As they melt, they release stored minerals into the water around them, and these turn them into mobile homes for a variety of life.

Kenneth L. Smith Jr, from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and other scientists from San Diego discovered the true extent of these icy ecosystems by studying two icebergs floating in the Antarctic Weddell Sea. Even the smaller of the two, W-86, has a surface area larger than 17 football pitches. The larger one, A-52 was over a thousand times bigger, with a surface area of 300 km² and extending 230 metres into the freezing waters.

Smith and crew identified the duo through satellite imaging, and tracked them down by boat. Their ship spiralled around the blocks of ice collecting water samples as it went, from a dangerously close distance of a few hundred feet to a safer five miles away.

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Helping out a threatened predator by culling their prey seems like a really stupid idea. But Scandinavian scientists have found that it might be the best strategy for helping some of our ailing fish stocks.

Lennart Persson and colleagues from Umeå University came up with this counterintuitive concept by running a 26-year natural experiment with the fish of Lake Takvatn, Norway. At the turn of the 20th century, the top predator in Lake Takvatn was the brown trout. Over-fishing sent its numbers crashing, and it was virtually gone by 1980.

In its place, a smaller fish – the Arctic char ­- was introduced in 1930. Char should make a good meal for trout, so it was surprising that when the trout were reintroduced they failed to flourish despite an abundance of food.

It was only in the 1980s, when the researchers removed over 666,000 char from the lake that the trout started bouncing back. While their prey population fell by 80%, the trout have increased in number by 30 times. The lake’s temperature and nutrient levels were mostly constant during this time, so why did the trout do better when they prey was culled?

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Many plants depend so heavily on visits from bees that they go to great lengths to attract them, using brightly coloured flowers baited with sweet nectar. But some of their tricks are much subtler and are designed not to attract six-legged visitors, but to make their stay more convenient.

The majority of flowering plants have evolved special conical cells that line the surface of their petals and are found nowhere else. These cells provide the flower with a rougher texture that is indistinguishable to human fingers, but that provide just enough purchase for the claws of landing insects. Heather Whitney from the University of Cambridge found that these conical cells turn the petal into a more conducive landing pad, and bees can tell if a petal has these bonus features or not by the way it reflects light.

About 80% of flowering plants possess these conical cells, but some develop mutations that do away with them. The snapdragon can develop a fault in the MIXTA gene, which prevents petal cells from developing into a conical shape. The lack of cones means that more white light reflects from the flowers’ surface, giving them a paler pink colour and making them stand out from the rich magenta of their peers. Honeybees tend to ignore these paler flowers, even though they smell the same as the normal variety.

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Image by Nicholas Conard

This sculpture may look a little bit like a roast chicken, but don’t let that distract you – it’s an incredibly important artistic find. This small figurine is arguably the oldest representation of the human body yet discovered.

The figure is clearly human, with short arms ending in five, carefully carved fingers, and a navel in the right position. But its most obvious features show that it depicts a woman, and very explicitly at that. She has large protruding breasts, wide hips and thighs, accentuated buttocks and pronounced vulva between her open legs. In contrast to these exaggerated sexual features, her arms and legs are relatively small and her head has been left out entirely. It was replaced with a carefully carved ring that probably allowed the figure to be suspended like a pendant.

The figurine is very similar to the so-called Venuses of Europe’s tool-making Gravettian culture. These prehistoric works of art also had crazily proportioned breasts, buttocks and genitals, as well as curiously downplayed heads, arms and legs. They were created between 22,000 and 27,000 years ago, but this new find is much older than that.

It was unearthed by Nicholas Conard from the University of Tubingen, who found the Venus three metres underground, within the Hohle Fels Cave in southern Germany. It’s just 6cm long and was carved from the solid ivory tusk of a mammoth. Judging by carbon-dating measurements of other finds from the dig site, Conard estimates that it was fashioned at least 35,000 years ago, although it could well be millennia older.

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In Mexico’s Cueva del Azufre (the Sulphur Caves), a small fish called the shortfin molly (Poecilia mexicana) is on the way to becoming two separate species. Those that live in the dark interior of the caves are very different to their relatives that swim in the bright, surface waters. They have lighter colours and live more solitary lives. Their eyes are smaller, less sensitive and have lower levels of light-sensitive pigment. Instead, they rely instead on a hypersensitive pressure detector – the lateral line – to sense disturbances in the water.

Their differences aren’t just skin deep either. Michael Tobler from the Texas A&M University has been studying the mollies for years, and has shown that the surface and cave populations have started to become genetically distinct.  The question is why? The caves are an open habitat with no physical barriers separating the two populations. What’s stopping them, and their genes, from mingling?

Tobler has found that one of these barriers is a living one. The mollies are hunted by an insect, the giant water-bug (Belostoma spp). It’s about the same size as the fish and lurks close to the water’s surface, waiting to stab passing prey with stiletto-like mouthparts. In the gloom of the cave, the surface fish are more vulnerable to the bug, but in the light, it’s the cavefish that are at a disadvantage. The same predator, hunting throughout the Sulphur Caves, is keeping two populations of the same species apart.

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Money has subtler benefits beyond the ability to buy lavish goods or luxurious services – it’s also a psychological and physical salve. According to research by Xinyue Zhou from Sun Yat-Sen University, handling money can soothe the sting of social rejection and appease the physical pain of hot water. Even bringing up the mere thought of money can have these effects.

Popularity matters to social animals like humans, who rely on each other for our wants and needs. Our dependence on each other makes it important to get along with our peers. But in many societies, money can bypass that need, allowing us to get our own way whether we’re liked or not. As such, Zhou and colleagues viewed money as a social resource, one that can substitute for popularity.

They reasoned that money should have a stronger allure for people who face social rejection, and that thoughts of profit should blunt the pain of isolation. Equally, thoughts of losing money should make the pain of exclusion more poignant as poorer people tend to be more dependent on others for their needs. And that’s exactly what they found through a series of six psychological experiments.

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The most comprehensive analysis yet of African genetic diversity was rightly hailed as “profoundly impressive” by Daniel MacArthur of Genetic Future. By looking at 2,400 people from 113 African populations, Sarah Tishkoff has “done justice to the sheer scale of the genetic diversity within the African continent.”

The Scandal of the Week award goes to pharmaceutical company Merck and publishing house Elsevier, following news that the former paid the latter to produce six fake journals promoting their drugs. Janet Stemwedel considers the story and the difference between fake journals and just plain bad ones.

PalMD wants to talk to you about syphilis

Martin Robbins the Lay Scientist discusses the siege conditions facing British sceptics following the ruling in the case of Simon Singh vs. the British Chiropractic Association.  

SciCurious wants you (or possibly you ventromedial prefrontal cortex) to choose between cake or death

The Onion takes the piss out of bloggers and I lap up every satirical word.

Alex Wild’s tenure at Photo Synthesis is coming to an end. More’s the pity, given stunning photos like this series of South African flies mugging ants for food.

Frank the SciencePunk challenged his Twitter followers to give him two unrelated topics to blog about. The result: a four-paragraph opus on cheese and Mars, with some time-reversal technology served on the side.

Dr Isis’s Letters to Our Daughters Project deserves your attention support. Female scientists tell you about their experiences.

Chris Chatham covers fascinating research which suggests that taking a step back can, quite literally, improve your mental control.

That gentle sobbing you hear is the lamentation of Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks as he reads a beautifully ham-fisted piece of popular neuroscience in the Sunday Times, which has “at least virtually every type of slip-up in one handy place“. Learn how not to do it.

Could aspects of our culture be partially encoded in our genome? Mo from Neurophilosophy writes about new research which suggests that the universal grammar of birdsong is genetically encoded.

Mistletoe: not just an excuse for drunken smooching, but a successful sci-fi-worthy parasite. Christie has the details.

Cognitive Daily discusses SNARC, a strange phenomenon in number-recognition tasks where the reaction times of the left hand are faster for low numbers, and those of the right hand are faster for high numbers. As opposed to snark, a strange phenomenon where internet commenters write confrontational diatribes while mentally hi-fiving themselves.

Skeptical blogging, especially among the medical sciences, is a crowded arena, but there’s always room for new contenders if they write as well as Whitecoat Tales, the medical student behind the relatively new Beyond the Short Coat blog. Come for the scepticism, stay for the stories.

And finally, have a go at destroying humanity by playing as a pandemic infection. But beware Madagascar, an unlikely stronghold.