The failure to identify a control group should probably tell us something: This is little more than a press release on some research in progress. Still, even before the results are in, the process of setting up the experiment turned out to be rather informative. The study, you see, is on porn consumption, and it looks like the researchers will be stuck working without anybody to act as a negative control. "We started our research seeking men in their twenties who had never consumed pornography," said Simon Louis Lajeunesse. "We couldn't find any."

Killer plants are all around us: According to traditional explanations, carnivorous plants are rare, and the habit only evolves among species that grow in very nutrient-poor environments. Not so, according to a review published by the Linnean Society. Apparently, modern molecular techniques have identified various digestive enzymes that are expressed on the surfaces of a wide range of plants, including common house plants like geraniums and crops like potatoes. Fear the petunia!

A deep-seated psychological need to know what tried to make you a meal: By its bitemark, you shall know them, according to some marine biologists who looked into the distinct dental features of various species of sharks. Although there are overlapping features, like tooth spacing and the fraction of the jaw covered in teeth, it's possible to combine the bite data with information about shark attacks (habitat, feeding approach, etc.) to provide reasonable certainty about the species and size of shark responsible.

I would have thought that knowing a shark tried to eat you would be enough but, according to one of the authors, that just isn't so. "There's a psychological need for many shark attack victims to know what bit them," U of Florida's George Burgess said. "One of the few things shark attack victims have going for them after a bite is bragging rights and the bragging rights include knowing what did the damage."

Eat, drink, and be merry, for getting old sucks: An old saying goes something along the lines of youth being wasted on the young, since they don't know how to appreciate it. It turns out they don't have a good grip on getting old, either. Survey results indicate that young people typically equate getting old to being miserable, and that pessimism influences their behavior. "Young male binge drinkers are particularly prone to thinking that happiness declines with age," the study's authors' discovered.

Fluorescent praire voles are a stepping stone to messing with family values: We can perform all sorts of genetic tricks with standard lab mice, but mice don't actually lend themselves to the study of things like mating behavior for a simple reason: they mate with anything in the same cage, provided it's of the opposite sex. Some of the more interesting studies of mating behavior have taken place in a different rodent, the vole, where a monogamous species (the prairie vole) is closely related to a species that swings (the meadow vole). So, some researchers decided it was time to introduce the voles to molecular genetics, and created the first transgenic prairie vole. The team inserted the current gene of choice for transgenic labeling as a test case, the green fluorescent protein, so the voles should now glow when exposed to UV.

Choosing sides in the predator-prey battle: The experimental protocol of this study seems a bit perverse: to explore the impact of predation on some lizards, the authors built artificial trees that gave some birds a better opportunity to wait for a chance to eat them. That had a knock-on effect, in that the lizards that were exposed to new predators changed their eating habits, switching to smaller targets in order to spend less time out in the open eating, which would expose them to the newly arrived bird population.