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How The Brain Handles Surprise, Good And Bad:

Whether it’s a mugger or a friend who jumps out of the bushes, you’re still surprised. But your response–to flee or to hug–must be very different. Now, researchers have begun to distinguish the circuitry in the brain’s emotion center that processes surprise from the circuitry that processes the aversive or reward “valence” of a stimulus. C. Daniel Salzman and colleagues published their findings in the journal Neuron.

Official Kilogram Losing Mass: Scientists Propose Redefining It As A Precise Number Of Carbon Atoms:

How much is a kilogram? It turns out that nobody can say for sure, at least not in a way that won’t change ever so slightly over time. The official kilogram — a cylinder cast 118 years ago from platinum and iridium and known as the International Prototype Kilogram or “Le Gran K” — has been losing mass, about 50 micrograms at last check. The change is occurring despite careful storage at a facility near Paris.

The Science Of Collective Decision-making:

Why do some juries take weeks to reach a verdict, while others take just hours? How do judges pick the perfect beauty queen from a sea of very similar candidates? We have all wondered exactly why we did not win a certain award. Now, new psychological research explains how groups come to a collective decision.

Understanding The Neuron’s Green Architecture:

Being green is a lifestyle. Turns out, each of your neurons is deeply committed to that green lifestyle – and you didn’t even know it. In just a thousandth of a second, a neuron can dump up to 5,000 molecules of its chemical messenger – a neurotransmitter – into the synapse, where it will trigger an impulse in a neighboring nerve cell. The neuron is a recycler par excellence when it comes to these neurotransmitters. Neurons must not only ready neurotransmitter receptors to receive the signals coming fast and furious, but they must also recycle receptors that have been used. And you thought you had recycling problems?

Biologists Expose Hidden Costs Of Firefly Flashes: Risky Balance Between Sex And Death:

A new study by biologists at Tufts University has discovered a dark side lurking behind the magical light shows put on by fireflies each summer. Using both laboratory and field experiments to explore the potential costs of firefly courtship displays, the biologists have uncovered some surprising answers.

Bioluminescence Genes Found Through Metagenomic Study Of Deep Mediterranean:

Metagenomics is a revolutionary approach to study microbes. Rather than isolating pure cultures, the power of high-throughput sequencing is applied directly to environmental samples to obtain information about the genomes of the prokaryotic cells present in a specific habitat studied. The ocean is an ideal subject of this approach because of its enormous microbiota, whose biomass equals that of all other living organisms on earth is mostly microbial, and also because most of these microbes are extremely fastidious to cultivate.

New Strategy To Create Genetically-modified Animals Developed:

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine have demonstrated the potential of a new strategy for genetic modification of large animals. The method employs a harmless gene therapy virus that transfers a genetic modification to male reproductive cells, which is then passed naturally on to offspring.

The Petri Dish Is Taken To New Dimensions:

A team of Brown University biomedical engineers has invented a 3-D Petri dish that can grow cells in three dimensions, a method that promises to quickly and cheaply produce more realistic cells for drug development and tissue transplantation.

Scientific Nursing Top Gives Breastfeeding Babies A Brain Workout:

Breastfeeding babies could become smarter thanks to a scientifically designed ‘clever baby’ nursing top recently revealed by the University of Portsmouth.

New Understanding Of Basic Units Of Memory:

A molecular “recycling plant” permits nerve cells in the brain to carry out two seemingly contradictory functions — changeable enough to record new experiences, yet permanent enough to maintain these memories over time.

Velociraptor Had Feathers:

A new look at some old bones have shown that velociraptor, the dinosaur made famous in the movie Jurassic Park, had feathers. The discovery was made by paleontologists at the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum of Natural History.

Personal Genomes: Mainstream In Five Years, But Who Should Have Access?:

Imagine this: you visit your clinician, undergo genetic testing, and then you are handed a miniature hard drive containing your personal genome sequence, which is subsequently uploaded onto publicly accessible databases. This may sound like science fiction, but it is scientific fact, and it is already happening.

Key To Longer Life (in Flies) Lies In Just 14 Brain Cells:

Two years ago, Brown University researchers discovered something startling: Decrease the activity of the cancer-suppressing protein p53 and you can make fruit flies live significantly longer. Now the same team reports an intriguing follow-up finding. The p53 protein, they found, may work its lifespan-extending magic in only 14 insulin-producing cells in the fly brain.

Eat Less To Live Longer: Calorie Restriction Linked To Long Healthy Lives:

For nearly 70 years scientists have known that caloric restriction prolongs life. In everything from yeast to primates, a significant decrease in calories can extend lifespan by as much as one-third. But getting under the hood of the molecular machinery that drives this longevity has remained elusive.

The Best Both Of Worlds: How To Have Sex And Survive:

Researchers have discovered that even the gruesome and brutal lifestyle of the Evarcha culicivora, a blood gorging jumping spider indigenous to East Africa, can’t help but be tempted by that ‘big is beautiful’ mantra no matter what the costs.

Basic Research Robust In Face Of More University Patenting:

As universities continue transforming scientific discoveries into potentially lucrative patents, many wonder how this might be transforming academic science itself.

Why Are Some Groups Of Animals So Diverse?:

A new study of finger-sized Australian lizards sheds light on one of the most striking yet largely unexplained patterns in nature: why is it that some groups of animals have evolved into hundreds, even thousands of species, while other groups include only a few?

Why Conservation Efforts Often Fail:

Modern conservation techniques have brought us the resurgence of American bald eagles, sustainable forest harvests and the rescue of prized lobster fisheries. So how can modern conservation strategies also have wrought such failures, from the catastrophic loss of Guatemalan forests to the economy-crippling Klamath River salmon kill in 2006?

Brain Network Related To Intelligence Identified:

A primary mystery puzzling neuroscientists – where in the brain lies intelligence? – just may have a unified answer.

The title alone should provoke a storm in the blogosphere 😉
Prehistoric Aesthetics Explains Snail Biogeography Puzzle:

The answer to a mystery that long has puzzled biologists may lie in prehistoric Polynesians’ penchant for pretty white shells, a research team headed by University of Michigan mollusk expert Diarmaid Ó Foighil has found.

Who’s Afraid Of The Big, Bad Wolf? Coyotes:

While the wily coyote reigns as top dog in much of the country, it leads a nervous existence wherever it coexists with its larger relative, the wolf, according to a new study from the Wildlife Conservation Society. In fact, coyote densities are more than 30 percent lower in areas that they share with wolves.

Gene Involved in Human Language Development Also Involved In Bat Echolocation:

When it comes to the FOXP2 gene, humans have had most to shout about. Discoveries that mutations in this gene lead to speech defects and that the gene underwent changes around the time language evolved both implicate FOXP2 in the evolution of human language.

Mortality Of Plants Could Increase By 40 Percent If Land Temperatures Increase 4 Degrees Celsius:

Scientists from the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies* have formulated a universal rule that explains the equilibrium of plant communities, showing how plants assure the survival of their species whether their lives last a day or are prolonged over centuries.

There are 28 new articles up on PLoS ONE today. As always, I offer you my own picks, but you go there and look at all of them, then read, rate, comment and annotate:
Living with the Past: Nutritional Stress in Juvenile Males Has Immediate Effects on their Plumage Ornaments and on Adult Attractiveness in Zebra Finches:

The environmental conditions individuals experience during early development are well known to have fundamental effects on a variety of fitness-relevant traits. Although it is evident that the earliest developmental stages have large effects on fitness, other developmental stages, such as the period when secondary sexual characters develop, might also exert a profound effect on fitness components. Here we show experimentally in male zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata, that nutritional conditions during this later period have immediate effects on male plumage ornaments and on their attractiveness as adults. Males that had received high quality food during the second month of life, a period when secondary sexual characteristics develop, were significantly more attractive as adults in mate choice tests than siblings supplied with standard food during this period. Preferred males that had experienced better nutritional conditions had larger orange cheek patches when nutritional treatments ended than did unpreferred males. Sexual plumage ornaments of young males thus are honest indicators of nutritional conditions during this period. The mate choice tests with adult birds indicate that nutritional conditions during the period of song learning, brain and gonad development, and moult into adult plumage have persisting effects on male attractiveness. This suggests that the developmental period following nutritional dependence from the parents is just as important in affecting adult attractiveness as are much earlier developmental periods. These findings thus contribute to understanding the origin and consequences of environmentally determined fitness components.

More under the fold….

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There is new cool stuff published last night in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine, including:

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Cyprian Honeybees Kill Their Enemy By Smothering Them:

For the first time, researchers have discovered that when Cyprian honeybees mob and kill their arch enemy, the Oriental hornet, the cause of death is asphyxiation. They reported their findings in Current Biology.

More…
Cell Death In Sparrow Brains May Provide Clues In Age-related Human Diseases:

A remarkable change takes place in the brains of tiny songbirds every year, and some day the mechanism controlling that change may help researchers develop treatments for age-related degenerative diseases of the brain such as Parkinson’s and dementia.

Which is very interesting to people who don’t care at all about human medicine, but one gotta sell the study to the media somehow…
New Light Shed On Hybrid Animals:

What began more than 50 years ago as a way to improve fishing bait in California has led a University of Tennessee researcher to a significant finding about how animal species interact and that raises important questions about conservation. In the middle of the 20th century, local fishermen who relied on baby salamanders as bait introduced a new species of salamander to California water bodies. These Barred Tiger salamanders came into contact with the native California Tiger salamanders, and over time the two species began to mate.

How Some Algae Tolerate Very Salty Environments:

Researchers have identified unique proteins that allow a unicellular alga called Dunaliella salina to proliferate in environments with extreme salt content. These results might provide ways to help crop plants resist the progressive accumulation of salt in soil, which is a major limitation for agricultural productivity worldwide.