Squid aren't picky about where they put their sperm: Inhabitants of the deep sea are spread pretty thin, so many of the species there take extreme measures to make sure they take full advantage of a mate when they find one. Now, researchers have studied a deep-sea squid in its native habitat and found that these animals don't even bother to check whether their fellow-species members are eligible mates or not. Using remotely operated vehicles, the authors found that both males and females carried equal numbers of sperm packets, indicating, "male squid routinely and indiscriminately mate with both males and females."

On the plus side, it could also delay being arrested: Lots of diseases have formal names that are quite different from those by which the public knows them. The disease adermatoglyphia has got to have one of the weirder public ones: "immigration delay disease." That's because individuals with the disorder fail to develop fingerprints. Researchers have now identified a gene that causes these immigration delays, and found it has a global effect on an essential cellular process (RNA splicing), but is only expressed in the skin. The ability of a general factor to produce such an oddly specific defect certainly fits the Weird Science staff's definition of weird.

To milk a pigeon, would you have to choke it?: Countless nature documentaries have driven home the image of birds sharing their food with their young through a rather simple method: vomiting the food back up. At least three types of bird (pigeons, flamingos and male emperor penguins), however, give their kids a little something extra: their digestive tract makes a milk-like substance that supplements whatever food the parents are providing. It seems that, in pigeons at least, the crop develops skin-like cells that overproliferate and are shed into the meal.

College students talk like they're having more fun than they are: The survey population was small (275 students), but the results were pretty believable. When it came to descriptions of various sexual encounters among their peers, most students seemed to think unplanned inebriated sex was the most common. But that's not actually the case. "Students overestimated how often others were hooking up, and these estimates were especially inflated by students who frequently talked about hooking up with friends," the authors write. In other words, the more the students heard about hooking up, the more they were convinced that everyone else was.

Growing guts that are ready for the feast part of "feast or famine": Large predators tend to sporadically hit the jackpot when it comes to food, and then spend the times in between going a bit hungry. And it turns out that they grow a digestive tract to compensate. Among fish, large predators have two- to three-times the digestive capacity as their typical daily intake, allowing them to take advantage of the good days, even though it adds an energetic cost during the lean times.

Obvious result of the week: alcohol and house fires are a bad mix: In a result that should surprise no one, people who happen to have a high blood-alcohol content are less likely to be aware that a house fire is happening. This has a couple of unusual consequences, at least in Australia: "fire fatalities with positive BAC levels were more than three times less likely to have their clothing alight or exits blocked than sober fire victims."