Recent research on an effect initially demonstrated in crickets shows that the so-called “Duke of Marlborough” effect extends to primates. The effect essentially demonstrates that males having recently won a fight against other males are both more likely to and more successful in courting females. The good part: the effect gained its name from an entry in the diary of the first Duchess of Marlborough, which reads: “His Grace returned from the wars today and pleasured me twice in his topboots.”

Whenever you have a half hour, head to the BBC’s site and listen to any of this year’s Reith lectures, given by distinguished neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran. They represent, by far, the most intriguing and accessible science thinking I’ve come across in months, covering topics from how consciousness emerges from the brain to vision processing circuitry as the source of what we find beautiful art.

Having spent too long focusing exclusively on film, and feeling starved for some hard science, I spent the past hour or so reading through a very well written set of articles discussing the probabilities involved in the old “monkeys typing shakespeare” saw, and the application of such statistics to arguments for intelligent design (a theistic position in favor of, minimally, God as watch-maker). Though I’m not sure I agree with the article’s conclusions (in particular, it glosses over the possibility of dependent ratchets in the early stages of chemical evolution), the articles are certainly intriguing and well written. If you have time to kill, you can read them here, here, and here.