Weird Science programs its zombie robot sparrows to KILL

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Angry birds vs. robotic zombies. There's so much weirdness here, I'm not even sure where to begin. First, there's the jargon-filled opening sentence: "Signaling often involves complex suites of behaviors that incorporate different sensory modalities." The "sensory modality" in question here is visual, in that it involves a bird waving its wing around as part of a territorial dispute among sparrows. If this sounds like much ado about nothing, be aware the press release claims the sparrows in question will sometimes fight to the death.

But the real thing setting this paper apart is its technique: It took taxidermy sparrows and reanimated them with robotics to see how living sparrows would respond to them. According to the PR, "The live birds responded most aggressively to the invading, wing-waving robotic sparrow, which Anderson [the lead researcher] said she expected." Clearly, she has formed expectations about things I never expected to see happen.

There's no such thing as a generic conservative. It took an international team of researchers to crunch these numbers, but the conclusions are clear: areas of the country that tend to vote for conservative candidates don't buy as many generic products. The authors ascribe this to conservative tendencies themselves, which cause the buyers to favor established national brands. They support that argument by noting newly established brands also tend to fare poorly in these same areas.