I thought I didn't like you, but then you mentioned the Supreme Court: Atheists are some of the least trusted members of society, consistently coming in last in polls that ask whether you'd vote for a hypothetical presidential candidate that had certain features. Now, researchers have figured out a way to make atheists a touch more appealing: prime people with thoughts of trusted secular authorities. This didn't eliminate the bias against atheists, but it did seem to reduce it a bit.

Buckyballs as a fabricated fountain of youth: The fullerenes are spherical cages of carbon atoms, the most common containing 60 of them. Their distinctive chemical properties have led to their use for a variety of materials, including a number in which they'll end up in contact with the human body—in a few cases, ingested as drugs. Various studies have shown that fullerenes are nontoxic when the exposure is brief, so one lab decided to give some rats a repeated dose of the fullerene and see what happens. Surprisingly, they report, the rats lived twice as long as their control peers, even though the fullerene was cleared within a couple of days.

That result may be weird, but there's something else fishy about the experiments. Derek Lowe, who first blogged about the results, saw his eagle-eyed readers dive into the paper, and come up with a bit of a problem. Two figures, meant to represent different data, actually turned out to be different views of the same sample. This could be an innocuous mistake but, as Lowe notes, it doesn't exactly give you confidence in the paper. So, best not to fry up your pork chops with buckyballs just yet.

Studying the past using a giant tower of bird poop: This is a way to reconstruct that past that only a faculty member with some expendable grad students would love: a large, unused tower that had been occupied by chimney swifts for decades, recording their history through the equivalent of sedimentary layers at the bottom. Except the sediment is bird poop. The authors could track the arrival of DDT and the changes it created in the insect populations eaten by the swifts using that 50-year record.

Maybe we should see how yeast respond to Viagra, too: Zoloft is an antidepressant that targets a signaling pathway used by nerve cells. Yeast have no nerve cells (more accurately, yeast are single cells that don't happen to be nerves). Yet, dump Zoloft on yeast, and it triggers significant changes, probably through altering the internal membranes of the yeast. All of which has some pretty serious implications, since the drug may be doing similar things in humans.

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Things were hot for this week's science news, with solar eruptions, local heating driven by wind farms, and the test firing of a rocket. But there were also plans to keep things cool, via floating windmills and an examination of the idea of buying up fossil fuel extraction rights, then not extracting them. Meanwhile, nearly a decade after its planned 90-day drive on Mars was done, one of NASA's rovers is still sending back valuable scientific data.

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When it comes to Welsh rugby, define "pope" broadly: Most of the stuff we cover here at Weird Science is inadvertently amusing, but researchers aren't beyond using the literature to have a bit of fun. That was the case with a Garreth Payne, who graced the pages of the BMJ in 2008 with a statistical analysis of whether the lifespan of popes was related to the performance of the Welsh rugby squad. Apparently, there's a saying among the Welsh that "every time Wales win the rugby grand slam, a Pope dies, except for 1978 when Wales were really good, and two Popes died," and Payne concluded that it didn't hold up to careful analysis.

This year, one Edward J. Snelson of the Sheffield Children’s Hospital wrote in to point out that Payne may have been too restrictive in his use of the term "pope." "This year saw the death of the Coptic pope, Shenouda III, on the very day that Wales won the grand slam," Snelson notes. He had made it for 41 years in that position after his predecessor, Cyril VI, had died the month that Wales had also won the grand slam. "[Payne's] research has created a false reassurance and may be putting the lives of other popes at risk," Snelson concludes.

Birds turn to agriculture because it turns on the ladies: I was already pretty impressed by bowerbirds, animals that build elaborate structures, with bright objects and tricks of the eye, all to attract a mate. Their work has some staying power, as a single male can maintain a bower for up to a decade. Now, it turns out, the birds may really be thinking long term, as they appear to be cultivating a crop there, if inadvertently. One of their decorations is the fruit of the potato bush, and females prefer nests with lots of these fruit in their ripe, shiny state. As the fruit goes past ripeness, the males clear them out and replace them with new ones.

As a new potato bush grows, it benefits from the birds, which clear out grass and weeds that might otherwise compete with it. And the birds benefit from having a ready source of decoration nearby. Although this cultivation probably isn't intentional, it may be resulting in a domesticated plant, since the ones growing near bowers tend to have shinier fruit than their wild-growing relatives.

That kidney's having a busy month: Most organ transplants have a significant failure rate but, for a specific type of kidney transplant, the odds of failure are about 40 percent. That's because of a disorder with the catchy name of Recurrent Focal Segmental Glomerulosclerosis. This problem, however, doesn't seem to be inherent to the kidney, but appears to be a result of the body's response to it. So, when a recent kidney recipient started displaying signs of Recurrent Focal Segmental Glomerulosclerosis, some medics decided to see if the kidney would do better in a new environment. So, two weeks after being transplanted into its first recipient, it was pulled out and put into a second. It worked. The kidney is now functioning properly in its third home.

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When it comes to Welsh rugby, define "pope" broadly: Most of the stuff we cover here at Weird Science is inadvertently amusing, but researchers aren't beyond using the literature to have a bit of fun. That was the case with a Garreth Payne, who graced the pages of the BMJ in 2008 with a statistical analysis of whether the lifespan of popes was related to the performance of the Welsh rugby squad. Apparently, there's a saying among the Welsh that "every time Wales win the rugby grand slam, a Pope dies, except for 1978 when Wales were really good, and two Popes died," and Payne concluded that it didn't hold up to careful analysis.

This year, one Edward J. Snelson of the Sheffield Children’s Hospital wrote in to point out that Payne may have been too restrictive in his use of the term "pope." "This year saw the death of the Coptic pope, Shenouda III, on the very day that Wales won the grand slam," Snelson notes. He had made it for 41 years in that position after his predecessor, Cyril VI, had died the month that Wales had also won the grand slam. "[Payne's] research has created a false reassurance and may be putting the lives of other popes at risk," Snelson concludes.

Birds turn to agriculture because it turns on the ladies: I was already pretty impressed by bowerbirds, animals that build elaborate structures, with bright objects and tricks of the eye, all to attract a mate. Their work has some staying power, as a single male can maintain a bower for up to a decade. Now, it turns out, the birds may really be thinking long term, as they appear to be cultivating a crop there, if inadvertently. One of their decorations is the fruit of the potato bush, and females prefer nests with lots of these fruit in their ripe, shiny state. As the fruit goes past ripeness, the males clear them out and replace them with new ones.

As a new potato bush grows, it benefits from the birds, which clear out grass and weeds that might otherwise compete with it. And the birds benefit from having a ready source of decoration nearby. Although this cultivation probably isn't intentional, it may be resulting in a domesticated plant, since the ones growing near bowers tend to have shinier fruit than their wild-growing relatives.

That kidney's having a busy month: Most organ transplants have a significant failure rate but, for a specific type of kidney transplant, the odds of failure are about 40 percent. That's because of a disorder with the catchy name of Recurrent Focal Segmental Glomerulosclerosis. This problem, however, doesn't seem to be inherent to the kidney, but appears to be a result of the body's response to it. So, when a recent kidney recipient started displaying signs of Recurrent Focal Segmental Glomerulosclerosis, some medics decided to see if the kidney would do better in a new environment. So, two weeks after being transplanted into its first recipient, it was pulled out and put into a second. It worked. The kidney is now functioning properly in its third home.

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This past week, our biggest story was a scoop that we got to ahead of most major news outlets: a bunch of billionaires were backing a company that planned to retrieve and mine asteroids. If that sounded a bit mind-boggling, it had nothing on the next most popular story, which described how quantum mechanics lets you make a decision that influences the result of measurements you made earlier. Another counterintuitive story indicated that the best solar panels are made of materials that could also be an efficient light emitter. All in all, a pretty surprising week in science news.

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