Sideswipe: February 10: Mr Hippo Head

Nice sperm finish last

Sperm are "ruthless competitors" who aren't above poisoning their brothers in the race to fertilise an egg. Researchers in Berlin studied mouse sperm cells to better understand the effects of a DNA sequence known as the t-haplotype. They already knew these sperm swim straighter (rather than in circles of death) and faster than competing sperm without it. Now, they've found that those straight shooters are a little less than sporting. Sperm with the t-haplotype manage to disable sperm without it and at the same time produce an antidote, which protects them. Researchers have called it a "selfish" gene — genetic material with a single mission: to make copies of itself. Because of the t-haplotype's ruthless effectiveness at passing from one generation to the next, according to the researchers, male mice carrying one copy of the gene sequence will transmit it to up to 99 per cent of their offspring.

Sacre bleu! French lunch culture shifts

The pandemic is forcing a new rule in France … It will now be legal to eat at your desk during work. Yes, you heard that right. It used to be against the law to neck a baguette with brie at your desk. But with the advent of Covid, the Government wants to make it easier for workers who report to offices to remain safe during the lunch hour. The original rule had been put on the books years ago to make sure bosses couldn't force their employees to work through lunch.

Fair warning

Animal insults speciesist

According to Peta, calling someone an animal as an insult reinforces the myth that humans are superior to other animals and justified in violating them. They want people to stop calling someone a chicken, when they mean coward, or calling someone a rat, when they mean snitch and refrain from calling someone a pig, when the mean to tell them they're repulsive. They call it "supremacist language" and "speciesist". "Great stuff," declares @MrButterChicken. "Can't read it now but I'll squirrel this away for later. My wife is hounding me to do chores instead of horsing around on Twitter."

Covid is a drag

1. Being a flight attendant is a tough job, but now even more so as they have to deal with anti-mask idiots. "...you have the guy eating one sunflower seed at a time so he can keep the mask off the whole flight," one member of cabin crew tells The Verge.
2. And according to Anil Dash, if they scrolled the names of the Americans who died in this pandemic the same way U2 did for victims of 9/11 during the Super Bowl in 2002, they would have to stop the game and run names on the screen for 12 and a half hours.