Weird Science tracks the evolution of road kill

Ars Technica » Scientific Method 2013-03-23

These two birds lost their legs in a one-sided altercation with a vehicle.

Taking the whole "adapt or you're road kill" thing rather literally. In the US, motor vehicles are killing about 80 million birds each year, the sort of figure that evolutionary biologists would call "selective pressure." And now, in a paper entitled "Where has all the road kill gone?", some researchers have gone out and confirmed that at least one bird population is experiencing an evolutionary response. Death-by-auto has been declining among the cliff swallows of western Nebraska for 30 years, and the researchers found that the bodies left behind after hit-and-runs had longer wings than the population as a whole. They conclude that the swallows wings are, on average, getting shorter to help them respond more quickly to oncoming traffic.

Diagnosis by text message, or "u r having a stroke." Medical authorities have become excited about the use of text messages, but mostly as an intervention—short reminders have been found to help people stay on their medications, or quit smoking. But a recent case study showed that, in rare circumstances, they be a diagnostic tool. Strokes tend to strike very specific areas of the brain, leaving surrounding ones functioning normally, which makes them hard to spot. In one case, a 40 year old male had symptoms of a stroke but could speak just fine. However, his texts had some serious issues, as they consisted of things like "Oh baby your;" and "Tjhe Doctor nddds a new bb."

Doctors are apparently calling this "dystextia," meaning "incoherent text messaging that can sometimes be confused with autocorrect garble."

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