Valentine's Day Tips for Cavemen and Beetles

Valentine's Day Johntex (GNU Free Documentation License)

Also in today's links: dead ducks, CO₂ vacuums and more.

• For Valentine's Day, male seed beetles give their lady friends lots of chips and salted peanuts, to get them good and thirsty. That's because female seed beetles seem to seek out sex for hydration.
• Canadian provinces have cried fowl over the death of 500 ducks last year, charging an oil sands company with breaking environmental laws. Rather than duck responsibility, a Syncrude spokesman said the company felt horrible about the deaths of the birds in a toxic oil byproduct. (I apologize for the mallardpropisms.)
• What if we could just suck large quantities of CO₂ right out of the air? We could, and some of the plans to do so are pretty neat. But they're not yet ready for prime time.
• The case of a man who appears free of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant from an HIV-resistant donor -- which was first in the news last fall -- has been reported in a medical journal.
• A composer has created a 75-minute work of music that is what he imagines Neanderthal music could have been like.