(AntonPree/Flickr)

Step right up to the buffet and help yourselves, folks:

• Where did that puppy in the window come from…evolutionarily speaking, that is? Put another where, where did dogs evolve from wolves? The answer really isn’t clear, because ancient dog bones and dog DNA tell different stories.
• From dogs to cats: DNA from the oldest known specimen of an ancient big cat fills some gaps in the question of where and when the ancestors of cats like lions, panthers, tigers, etc. evolved.
• Like the honey badger, the Tuscan porcupine don’t give a sh!t. Nor does it have to, because it has, “needle-sharp quills, some longer than the average human forearm.”
• Doctors have struggled for years to come up with new ways to help babies who get stuck during birth, especially ways that would work in developing countries. A car mechanic from Argentina may have beat them all to the punch.
• The clean rooms where the rocket scientists put satellites together are supposed to be just that: clean. Really clean. Sterile, really. But a newly discovered bacterial species thrives there, one that “survives with almost zero nutrients.”
• Do you care about beer? (That was a rhetorical question, because I know you do.) Then you must care about evolution. Especially the evolution of the microbes that give beer, whiskey and other spirits their “microbial terroir.”
• Your depression may be making you older at the cellular level.
• One way for bacteria to avoid antibiotics is to go dormant; the drugs don’t work when the bugs are asleep. But a new compound that turns up a bacterium’s internal garbage disposal may serve as the basis for a new antibiotic that works against some sleeping bacteria.
• You’ve heard about the Pacific Garbage Patches, where marine debris tend to concentrate? The plastic trash there and other places in the sea may have spawned the evolution of a whole new community of microbes — dubbed the “plastisphere” — that feed on plastics.
• Public health officials in several African nations are gambling that they can knock back malaria with prophylactic drugs quickly enough that the bug won’t have a chance develop resistance. Will it pay off?
• Great, now even the crows are carrying antibiotic-resistant bacteria around.
• Remember the one about the doctor who pulled a tick out of his nose and discovered a new species? Now we have a researcher who let a sand flea grow in her foot so she could better understand their life cycle.
• “Huh?” could be a universal expression of, “huh?”