The Weird:  Whoah, certain amazing scientists can read minds now (sort of)….no kidding!  If you have a paid subscription to Current Biology,  read about it here; otherwise read about it at this friendly, fun location.

The Wild:  Warning! Do not eat the mustard greens at UC- San Diego! They are flavored with the luciferase firefly protein! Just kidding…the “flavored” greens are only in the lab of those crafty scientists, Jose Pruneda-Paz, Steve A. Kay and their colleagues.  These wildly inventive scientists have devised a new and elegant way to monitor the actual chemicals they discovered that control how plants tell time (Pruneda-Paz et al. might say “CHE proteins” not “chemicals”, but, hey, I am a chemist).  Read to the end of the article to see Kay’s video.  Makes me want to get back in the lab and work with wild scientists again, even if they are biologists or biochemists or whatever.

CLOCK-WATCHERCLOCK-WATCHER. This mustard plant is genetically engineered to show blue in tissues where the protein CHE is active. CHE is a newly discovered component of plants’ circadian clock that helps plants tell night from day.Image courtesy of Steve A. Kay and of Science/AAAS. Picture and text from Science news.

The Wooly: I know, I know, sequencing the genome of the Woolly Mammoth is old news – but it is news to me!  I have been wasting my time following events a few continents away.

Daddy Mammoth? (picture credit)

Daddy Mammoth’s son? (jk) “A 10,000-year-old baby mammoth dug from the Siberian permafrost in May last year. The mammoth genome differs from the African elephant by just 0.6%. Photograph: Francis Latreille/AP” (picture/quoted text credit)

This frozen baby is going to thaw, y’all, at that short sleeve temperature!

But does the Guardian give the whole story?  Of course not! The full story is told a little better in Science Daily, and probably even better in Science, but the Guardian’s picture is the best!

The Penn State scientists announced partially sequencing the genome of the Woolly Mammoth’s “son” before the MIT-Harvard group had time to complete the sequence of the African Elephant, the WM’s closest living relative. Get going Harvard-MIT!

“Only after the genome of the African elephant has been completed will we be able to make a final assessment about how much of the full woolly-mammoth genome we have sequenced,” said Miller (The lead investigator at Penn State). From: Science Daily.