My picks from ScienceDaily

In A Technical Tour De Force, Scientists Take A Global View Of The Epigenome:

A collaboration between researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California at Los Angeles captured the genome-wide DNA methylation pattern of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana - the "laboratory rat" of the plant world - in one big sweep.

"In a single experiment we recapitulated 20 years worth of anecdotal findings and then some," says senior author Joseph Ecker, Ph.D., a professor in the Salk Institute's Plant Biology Laboratory. "Previously, only a hand full of plant genes were known to be regulated by methylation. In addition to those, we found hundreds of others."

Feelings Matter Less To Teenagers, Neuroscientist Says:

Teenagers take less account than adults of people's feelings and, often, even fail to think about their own, according to a UCL neuroscientist. The results, presented at the BA Festival of Science today, show that teenagers hardly use the area of the brain that is involved in thinking about other people's emotions and thoughts, when considering a course of action.

Many areas of the brain alter dramatically during adolescence. One area in development well beyond the teenage years is the medial prefrontal cortex, a large region at the front of the brain associated with higher-level thinking, empathy, guilt and understanding other people's motivations. Scientists have now found that, when making decisions about what action to take, the medial prefrontal cortex is under-used by teenagers. Instead, a posterior area of the brain, involved in perceiving and imagining actions, takes over.

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While children start to think about other people's mental states at around age five, this new data shows that the neural basis of this ability continues to develop and mature well past early childhood.

A second piece of research presented at the festival shows that teenagers are also less adept at taking someone else's perspective and deciding how they would feel in another person's shoes.

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"Whatever the reasons, it is clear that teenagers are dealing with, not only massive hormonal shifts, but also substantial neural changes. These changes do not happen gradually and steadily between the ages of 0--18. They come on in great spurts and puberty is one of the most dramatic developmental stages."

Fast-freeze Snapshot Yields New Picture Of Nerve-muscle Junction:

When nerve cells excite muscle fibers to flex, getting synaptic proteins and components into the right place can mean the difference between feats of strength or lapses of drowsy lethargy.

Several proteins that have been shown to be major players in synaptic transmission have now been studied using a flash-freeze physical-fixation technique that reveals new details of their location and function in neuromuscular synapses. The technique was used with tiny, one-millimeter-long nematode worms, a lab animal widely studied by neuroscientists.