JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Crocodile, meet shirt. Chris Banks, Melbourne Zoo’s director for international conservation partnerships, introduces a baby crocodile to David Celdran, Philippine endorser of the Lacoste Save Your Logo project.

Unless you are cut off from civilization you have probably heard about biodiversity loss and its impact on the environment. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List reports that 1 in 8 birds, 1 in 4 mammals, and 1 in 3 amphibians are endangered species. An estimated 15 to 37 percent of all species will be extinct in 40 years unless we do something more than rattle off alarming statistics or claim to be environmentalists in order to look cool.

Some species have advantages over others. We’ll donate to campaigns to protect whales and dolphins because they’re cute and in the event of an ocean disaster we imagine they would be our aquatic Leonardo DiCaprios. We’ll buy T-shirts with pictures of lions and stuffed toy tigers because big cats are beautiful, majestic creatures. We’ll visit tarsier reservations because they’re cute, although we really need to weigh the nocturnal beasties’ interests against the entertainment of loud tourists with their blinding flash cameras.

But crocodiles? Not an easy species to love. They’re hideous, they’re scary, and in countless movies we’ve seen them eat people (hence their bad reputation, which is unfair). But if crocodiles cease to exist, the complex balance in wetland ecosystems would be upset. We would lose one of the last survivors of the prehistoric age, a creature that has not changed in the last 100 million years. Crocodiles lived through the rise and extinction of the dinosaurs and the evolution of our own ancestors; it would be terrible if they don’t survive human encroachment into their natural habitats.

Read our column Emotional Weather Report today in the Philippine Star.

From the Coens’ Blood Simple, a smart movie about people doing stupid shit.

That title goes out to our friend The Bone. What’s our one movie of the year this year?

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There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.

Low IQ and Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

Illustration by Srinivass. In India, the power of disgust to improve villagers’ hygiene is being tested. Center of Gravity, a Bangalore agency working with Valerie Curtis, a disgust researcher, created skits including this role, Laddu Lingam; he makes treats of mud and worms and never washes his hands. Another character, Supermom, shows the proper behavior.

Read Survival’s Ick Factor by James Gorman in the NYT.

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Equilibrioception. Whether you’re slaloming down a slope or strutting down a street, this sense—otherwise known as balance—helps keeps you upright. Although vision plays a role in equilibrioception, the vestibular system of the inner ear is mainly responsible.

Interoception. When we take our internal perception into account, we have even more senses. These are linked to sensory receptors found in internal organs, such as those in the lungs that control respiratory rate.”

Extra Sensory Perceptions: Aristotle missed the mark when he named only five in Harvard Medicine.

The late Steven Rawlings was one of the lead scientists in the Square Kilometer Array project to build the world’s largest radio telescope.

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Academics have said they are stunned by the sudden death of the Oxford professor Steven Rawlings, 50, at the home of a colleague.

His friend and colleague Devinder Sivia, 49, a lecturer in mathematics for sciences at Oxford University who was arrested at the scene on suspicion of murder, was released on police bail on Friday and detectives said the death may be “a matter for a coroner’s inquest rather than a criminal court”…

Death of professor Steven Rawlings shocks Oxford

The Dune Universe has come to us.

Ixian Insignia

Read Demonstration of temporal cloaking.

Thanks to Din for the alert.

We’re not into perfume; strong scents give us a headache. If you want to make us leave a room immediately, send in a guy doused in cologne. We don’t care how gorgeous he is or whether his perfume was distilled by Carthaginian monks who had taken a vow of silence and worked only by the light of a waxing gibbous moon, we’re outta there. We’ll put up with the stench of a kitty litter box because we have to, but prolonged exposure to Chanel No. 5 makes our head start pounding.

That said, we really enjoyed Perfumes, the A-Z Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez.

Luca Turin is a biophysicist who studies the science of smell. We learned about him from TED. This book is a field guide to nearly 2,000 perfumes in the market, written in a style that combines erudition and wiseassery.

It’s an excellent shopping companion. A couple of years ago we field-tested this book by going to designer boutiques, sniffed their perfumes, and then reading the corresponding reviews. Aloud.

For instance, at Hermes we asked for a whiff of Osmanthe Yunnan, which gets a 5-star rating from Turin and Sanchez. Then we read, “When Jean-Claude Ellena, now in-house perfumer at a little saddler’s outfit called Hermes first did the soapy suede-and-apricots scent of the osmanthus flower for The Different Company’s Osmanthus, it was like one of those deceptively simple, pretty Paul McCartney melodies that seem so obvious once heard, you suspect he finds them lying fully formed in the street…” If the sales staff found us strange they hid it well; then again we are strange. We also went to Marc Jacobs and clucked over the perfume that only merited 3 stars.

Among the perfumes that get a 5-star rating are Angel, Aromatics Elixir, Badgley Mischka, Cool Water, Cuir de Russie, Dior Homme, Dune, Eau Sauvage, Knowing, Kouros, Secretions Magnifiques and Ubar.