My Picks From ScienceDaily

Bees Seem To Benefit From Having Favorite Colors:

A bee's favourite colour can help it to find more food from the flowers in their environment, according to new research from Queen Mary, University of London. Dr Nigel Raine and Professor Lars Chittka from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences studied nine bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) colonies from southern Germany, and found that the colonies which favoured purple blooms were more successful foragers.

How Dads Influence Their Daughters' Interest In Math:

It figures: Dads have a major impact on the degree of interest their daughters develop in math. That's one of the findings of a long-term University of Michigan study that has traced the sources of the continuing gender gap in math and science performance.

Surprisingly, Harvesting Prey Boosts Predator Fish:

Cod, salmon, and salmon trout have in many cases disappeared from our seas and lakes because of overfishing. New research findings show that these predator fish would be able to recover if both recreational and professional fishers focused their fishing on the fish these predators prey on.

Taking Animals Out Of Laboratory Research:

Pioneering work to reduce the use of animals in scientific research -- and ultimately remove them from laboratories altogether -- has received a major boost at The University of Nottingham. A laboratory devoted to finding effective alternatives to animal testing has been expanded and completely remodelled in a £240,000 overhaul designed to hasten the development of effective non-animal techniques.

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Helping out a threatened predator by culling their prey seems like a really stupid idea. But Scandinavian scientists have found that it might be the best strategy for helping some of our ailing fish stocks. Lennart Persson and colleagues from UmeÃ¥ University came up with this counterintuitive…
Long-held Assumptions Of Flightless Bird Evolution Challenged By New Research: Large flightless birds of the southern continents - African ostriches, Australian emus and cassowaries, South American rheas and the New Zealand kiwi - do not share a common flightless ancestor as once believed. Instead…
Pendulums, Predators And Prey: The Ecology Of Coupled Oscillations: Connect one pendulum to another with a spring, and in time the motions of the two swinging levers will become coordinated. This behavior of coupled oscillators---long a fascination of physicists and mathematicians---also can help…
tags: Bumblebees, Bombus species, Hymenoptera, insects, entomology, natural history Common Eastern Bumblebee, Bombus impatiens. This species is often relied upon to pollinate commercial food crops, such as tomatoes, that are often grown in agricultural greenhouses. Image: Wikipedia [larger view…