My picks from ScienceDaily

Researcher Studies Sleep Deprivation's Effect On Decisions:

Everyone needs sleep, but temporary periods with no sleep can be a reality of military operations. To get answers on sleep questions for the military as well as civilians, for nearly four years Dr. Sean Drummond, a Department of Defense-funded researcher, has studied the effects of sleep deprivation on the brain, namely in decision making, as well as how long it takes to recover from periods of no sleep.

Early Exposure To Synthetic Estrogen Puts 'DES Daughters' At Higher Risk For Breast Cancer:

So-called "DES daughters," born to mothers who used the anti-miscarriage drug diethylstilbestrol during pregnancy, are at a substantially greater risk of developing breast cancer compared to women who were not exposed to the drug in utero.

Scientists Solve Sour Taste Proteins:

A team led by Duke University Medical Center researchers has discovered two proteins in the taste buds on the surface of the tongue that are responsible for detecting sour tastes.

Scientists Reverse Evolution: Ancient Gene Reconstructed From Descendants:

University of Utah scientists have shown how evolution works by reversing the process, reconstructing a 530-million-year-old gene by combining key portions of two modern mouse genes that descended from the archaic gene.

I am not sure if "reversing evolution" is the correct term to be applied here, except in making an eye-catching title for this article...
Update: PZ Myers explains the study in detail (and agrees that this is not "evolution in reverse").

Researchers Find New Learning Strategy:

Central to being human is the ability to adapt: We learn from our mistakes. Previous theories of learning have assumed that the size of learning naturally scales with the size of the mistake. But now biomedical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have shown that people can use alternative strategies: Learning does not necessarily scale proportionally with error.

Nicotine Found To Protect Against Parkinson's-like Brain Damage:

New research suggests that nicotine treatment protects against the same type of brain damage that occurs in Parkinson's disease. The research was conducted in laboratory animals treated with MPTP, an agent that produces a gradual loss of brain function characteristic of Parkinson's. Experimental animals receiving chronic administration of nicotine over a period of six months had 25 percent less damage from the MPTP treatment than those not receiving nicotine.

Dunno....did smoking help my Dad live a little longer?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/060807154944.htm:

No matter how you slice it, the freshwater planarian possesses an amazing ability to regenerate lost body parts. Chop one into pieces, and each piece can grow into a complete planarian. The flatworm relies upon a population of stem cells to accomplish this remarkable feat; recent work sheds light on how planarians maintain these stem cells throughout their lives.

Brain Stimulation That May Boost Vision From The Corner Of Your Eye:

By using simultaneous brain stimulation and activity recording to track the influence of one brain region on another, researchers have developed a new method for boosting brain function that may have implications for treatments of brain disorders and for improving vision. The findings are reported by Christian Ruff, Jon Driver, and their colleagues at University College London and appear in the August 8th issue of Current Biology, published by Cell Press.

Ancient Bison Teeth Provide Window On Past Great Plains Climate, Vegetation:

A University of Washington researcher has devised a way to use the fossil teeth of ancient bison as a tool to reconstruct historic climate and vegetation changes in America's breadbasket, the Great Plains.

The Shape Of Life: Research Sheds Light On How Cells Take Shape:

How life takes shape is a mystery. Butterfly or baby, cells organize themselves into tissues, tissues form organs, organs become organisms. Over and over, patterns emerge in all living creatures. Spiders get eight legs. Leopards get spots. Every nautilus is encased in an elegant spiral shell.

This phenomenon of pattern formation is critical in developmental biology. But the forces that govern it are far from clear. Alan Turing, father of modern computer science, suggested that the basis for pattern formation was chemical. New research conducted at Brown University and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences supplies another surprising answer: Physical, as well as chemical, forces can dictate pattern formation.

Surprising? Since when? D'Arcy Thomspon?