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Check out this deft rap about life on other planets by Jonathan Chase, a.k.a. Oort Kuiper (yes, that Oort and that Kuiper). The delivery is subdued and literate, like Massive Attack-era Tricky, and the video incorporates clips from Cosmos, the classic PBS series narrated by Carl Sagan. Bonus points for cribbing footage from SETI and working in a cameo by Gregor Mendel.

The bar on science rap has been raised. Once a novelty act confined to late-night grad-school potlucks, where just finding something to rhyme with “plate tectonics” was a triumph; now you get spot-on lyrics backed by leaping basslines and 1950s samples.

Other recent triumphs of the genre include the cogent Large Hadron Rap (405,000 hits in less than a month) and the salt-soaked Cruise, Cruise Baby. Say what you want about the LHR’s backup dancers (I was under the impression that experimental physics required nanosecond-accurate timing) - but I learned more about the setup, mechanics, and ambition of the Large Hadron Collider from this rap than from everything I’ve read on the subject previously put together.

Hat tip: Knight Science Journalism Tracker [though Tracker, please note that's a British accent]

I spent last week at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology meetings at Cornell University.

Behavioral ecology, the study of what animals do and how it affects their lives, can be delightfully arcane. One research team designed a robot stickleback in order to learn how many fish it takes to persuade a school to change direction. (Early results suggest the answer is two.)

Another team found that African honeybee workers surreptitiously raise their own eggs rather than those of their queen overlords, in effect staging a bloodless coup.

Mitchell Baker, of Queens College, New York, had some amazing insights into pesticide resistance studying the formidable Colorado potato beetle. “If you leave them alone,” he said, “they will eat a field down to brown sticks.”

A pesticide, like an antibiotic, is supposed to kill any pest that’s not resistant to it. But when survivors get together to breed, one thing they all have to bequeath to their young is pesticide resistance. “Potato beetles can evolve resistance to anything you can throw at them, usually within three generations,” Baker said.

Resistance can have a downside for the beetle, though. It comes with a grab bag of handicaps. Through novel experiments at agricultural fields, Baker discovered that pesticide-resistant beetles hatch later, move more slowly, have compromised immune systems, mate less successfully, raise fewer young, die off during the winter at greater rates, and get cannibalized by their nestmates more often than non-resistant beetles.

Apparently, the genes that make a beetle resistant have such debilitating side-effects that it takes the application of deadly pesticides just for them to survive the competition. Baker’s research could point to ways to postpone widespread resistance by taking advantage of those weaknesses.

It’s tempting to view the world as a collection of species perfectly adapted to living together. But what I find fascinating about evolution are the compromises that constantly play out on any species’ scrap heap of talents. For potato beetles, pesticides are pulling resistance to the top of the pile. But change what’s killing them-a different pesticide, perhaps, or maybe hotter summers-and resistance will fall to the wayside in favor of something equally vital for the moment.

(Image: Colorado potato beetle; Scott Bauer/USDA/Wikipedia)

It’s happened. We’re in the early 21st century, and it’s now possible for a space suit to look hopelessly outdated. I mean, would you pilot a 1950s vehicle off the planet in something that looks like it recently came off a baked potato? I think Devo once made a music video in more sophisticated space apparel than this.

But it’s fun looking at the progression of space suit fashion in this NASA slideshow (link is at lower left of page). You even get some glimpses of the future, both conceptual drawings and shots of astronauts testing out the new designs on a dusty Washington lake bed. There’s also the famous 1984 shot of the first untethered spacewalk - a prospect that still makes me shiver.

The slideshow doesn’t offer any pics of women in space (even though 40 American women have achieved escape velocity). If you hanker for a break from all the manliness, check out NASA’s tribute to Sally Ride, who last week celebrated her 25th anniversary as the first American woman in space.

On the fashion side, keep your eyes peeled for the next major development. On July 4, Mattel rolls out “Space Camp Barbie.” Who says we’re losing our edge in science and technology?

(Image: NASA)

Long ago, economists realized that people are largely motivated by self-interest. They put the best face on this rather disheartening fact of human nature by inventing ways to shunt the selfish toward the common good. Today, the global marketplace takes selfishness as a central tenet, and by the way it’s thriving, it appears they were right.

But not always, according to economist Samuel Bowles, in the current issue of Science. Apparently, there is some good in all of us that is still pretty hard to buy - some stubborn attraction to doing the right thing that, Bowles argues, policy makers would do well to pay attention to.

Among his examples are a group of parents taking their kids to daycare in Haifa, Israel. The daycare center instituted a charge for parents who showed up late in the afternoon to pick up their kids.

What happened? Tardiness didn’t drop out - it doubled. In the researchers’ evaluation, parents began to see late pickup as a service they were entitled to buy. Until lateness cost anything, the parents were more likely to view it as an imposition on the poor overworked daycare staff. But the fee changed that.

As Bowles described it, in a marketplace populated by schemers and grabbers:

“Prices do the work of morals, recruiting shabby motives to elevated ends.”

But it’s not shabby motives that lead people to give blood rather than sell it, Bowles pointed out. In another study, students were allowed to simulate governments, giving away money but making “laws” about what percentage must be returned. The most generous returns came when people were under no obligation to return any money at all.

This scenario reminds me of that little let-down you get when you donate to public broadcasting and a tote bag or coffee mug arrives as a thank-you. Hold on, I say to myself, I donated because I’m a good person and I enjoy spirited car-repair advice. Have I just become a mere customer?

I’m heartened by Bowles’s argument. Next, I want to see economists tackle the blogosphere. Does jettisoning one’s thoughts into the fiberoptic universe - whether via post or comment - count as selfish or noble? Is it for your own good, or someone else’s?

(Image by Allan Ramsay (1766) of David Hume - who, according to Bowles, “advocated that public policies should be designed for ‘knaves’”)

It was just three years ago that Hurricane Rita stormed the Texas coastline, mere weeks after Katrina flattened Louisiana. While New Orleans struggles to rebuild, Texas seems to have forgiven, forgotten, and embraced the sunny weather. The Houston Chronicle reports that development values along the state’s picturesque Gulf Coast have tripled since Rita.Though real estate agents may be celebrating, the trend is causing consternation among insurance companies, which would be called upon to cover the region’s $64 billion of development should another bad hurricane season get Texas in its sights. At present, the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association has just $1.4 billion on hand for such an eventuality.

The Chronicle article gives a breakdown of how insurance firms might cover the remainder. But the upshot is that after such a payout, many insurance companies might stop selling insurance in the hurricane-prone areas entirely, leaving homeowners (anything but) high and dry.

But what’s the chance of another bad hurricane season? Well, hurricanes are fueled by warm water. And though the ocean is unruly, over the long term it’s slowly warming along with the atmosphere. That’s likely to make hurricanes more intense, a conclusion long argued by MIT’s Kerry Emanuel and covered on an insurance news site just three weeks before Katrina struck. Here’s one powerful industry, at least, that’s sitting up and taking notice of the problem - even if it’s largely by raising premiums or getting out of the market.

(Image: Rita wedges herself into the 500-mile gap between New Orleans and Cancun. Hat tip: Surfrider)