Primate intelligence gives me cognitive dissonance. It’s fascinating that monkeys can recognize numbers, construct tools and even follow to-do lists. But it also bruises my ego, just slightly, knowing that monkeys aren’t that different from my parents, friends or heroes. (Michael Phelps excluded. He’s the übermensch.)

Sex and science usually steer clear of one another, and rightfully so. Most people don’t want their sex clinical and most researchers don’t want their science emotional. Yet lately the science of sex seems to have entered the public discourse in a big way. Olivia Judson (author of Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice To All Creation) blogs for the New York Times; and Bonk, a book about scientific research into the how's and why’s of sex, is a best seller.

Widely recognized as the most important sea bird habitat on Earth, Gough Island is a geographically perfect place for the animals to raise their young. It is one of the most remote places in the South Atlantic, nearly 2000 miles from both Africa and South America and 220 miles from the next nearest island in its archipelago. It is this isolation which has allowed its ecosystem to remain a nearly perfect home for the 22 bird species that seek its shelter in order to breed.

Our own Theodore Gray (the man behind Gray Matter's mad science) is currently in China, and he's taken the opportunity to put his new Casio EX-F1 high-speed camera to excellent use at the Beijing Zoo. And when we say excellent we mean the majestic hawk at the Beijing zoo defecating and flapping its wings at 300 frames per second kind of excellent. And if that's not enough, he's got a dolphin leaping from beneath the water and a sparrow taking flight to boot.

The Plagues of Egypt in the book of Exodus are horrible, fantastical events we have yet to witness on Earth: rivers running with blood, hail mixed with fire, the deaths of firstborns. Some plagues, however, we do see from time to time. For modern-day farmers, locusts are very much a real, destructive force. Swarming in groups by the billions, locusts can travel hundreds of miles, stripping vegetation bare as they go. Scientists have never entirely understood the phenomenon, although one study has suggested swarming results from a lot of banging around as a consequence of overcrowding.

The seahorse is a strange fish. Many of the traits it possesses have evolved in a direction unlike any other family of animals underwater—its bent S-shape; its head at a 90-degree angle to its body; its prehensile tail; and, most curiously, the male's brood pouch. A lab at Texas A&M University led by Adam Jones is currently studying these structures in the hope of understanding how it was that male pregnancy evolved in seahorses and how it affects the traditional sex roles in the fish.

We can only assume DARPAs cyborg moths will be deployed relatively close to their targets, but we have no real word yet on their potential range. If the military does find the need to release the moths from the rear of operations under the cover of darkness, they would do well to pay attention to research coming out of the United Kingdom on how moths are able to migrate at night.