(lsgcp/Flickr)

Yes, good morning waitress. I’ll have the science.

• Why does a lobster turn red when you cook it? Because you let its astaxanthin get loose.
• It’s like Inception, but for mice: Neuroscientists at MIT have implanted a false memory about a place into mice.
• It used to be that North and South America weren’t connected. As a result, the animals on the two continents went off on their own evolutionary paths. But when sea levels went down and Panama appeared, can you guess what happened? A kind of zoological throwdown.
• Curious about the future geologic fate of the Atlantic Ocean? Look to Gibraltar.
• Take a spaceship. Stretch space in front of it, squeeze space behind it, and voilà! warp field. Sounds easy, right? Just ask this guy at NASA.
• Why is everyone crazy around the full moon? Maybe because they’re getting less sleep.
• It’s hard to muscle a mussel off of a rock. Here’s why. (Hint: it’s all about the byssus threads.) The answer could help engineers design new adhesives and glues.
• As worms die, their cells suddenly start to glow an eerie blue. And that glow may help scientists better understand what happens to cells as they age.
• Remember a couple of weeks ago, we talked about how flatworms can retain memories even if you cut their heads off? There are some species of flatworms that can’t regrow new heads. Tweaking one genetic pathway turns the ability back on.
• Antibiotic resistance among bacteria is getting to the scary stage. Which is why the news that a new antibiotic had been discovered in bacteria on the California coast is so welcome. (Yes, some bacteria make antibiotics, to fight off other bacteria.) The new antibiotic, dubbed anthracimycin, isn’t available in at your hospital or pharmacy yet, but in mice it could take down drug-resistant MRSA infections.
• There’s a common soil bacteria called Myxococcus xanthus. It hunts in packs.
• Last week’s heat wave in the eastern US finally broke, but parts of Europe are still feeling the heat. But why can heat waves be so dangerous? Because if the air temperature gets too much above body temperature, instead of the body the releasing heat to the air to cool off, the reverse happens.
• The Internets were in a tizzy this week saying that the molecular basis of depression had been discovered. That it’s all being pinned on a single molecule makes me a bit wary.
• Gastric bypass surgery might help patients lose weight in part by cranking up the gut’s sugar-burning furnaces to eleven. (Disclosure: This article is about a study carried out by a scientist at my employer, Boston Children’s Hospital.)
• To get a better idea of how guppies mate, researchers took the step of shaving off the males’ gonopodial claws. Take a guess what that means before you click.