My picks from ScienceDaily

Songbirds Prefer The Latest Music: Golden Oldies Just Don't Cut It With The Chicks:

When it's time to mate, female white-crowned sparrows are looking for a male who sings the latest version of the love song, not some 1979 relic. And territorial males simply find the golden oldie much less threatening. Duke University graduate student Elizabeth Derryberry played two versions of the white-crowned sparrow song to the birds as part of her thesis research and found that a 1979 recording didn't inspire them nearly as well as a 2003 recording of the very same song.

Birds Take Cues From Their Competitors:

The idea that animals other than humans can learn from one another and pass on local traditions has long been a matter of debate. Now, a new study reveals that some birds learn not only from each other, but also from their competitors. Through a novel field experiment, the researchers showed that female members of two migrant flycatcher species can acquire a novel preference for nesting sites on the basis of the apparent attraction of competing resident tits for nest boxes bearing an otherwise meaningless symbol.

Mimicry: Research Ends Debate Over Benefits Of Butterfly Defenses:

Scientists have furthered understanding of the relationship between predator and prey in an experiment designed to understand butterfly defence mechanisms. Researchers observed the behaviour of Great-tits foraging for artificial prey to understand more clearly how a species evolves to protect themselves from predators.

Best Males Have Less Successful Daughters:

The strongest and fittest of a species might be expected to produce the best offspring, but this is not always the case, researchers at the University have found. Studies of red deer published recently in Nature suggest that the most successful males are more likely to produce less fertile daughters.

Fat Horses Face Health Problems:

America's growing obesity problem has alarmed physicians and public health officials, and veterinarians have recently focused their attention on fat dogs and cats. Now, a team of researchers in the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine (VMRCVM) and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) at Virginia Tech has determined that horses are also facing serious health risks because of obesity. Fifty-one percent of the horses evaluated during the pioneering research were determined to be overweight or obese -- and may be subject to serious health problems like laminitis and hyperinsulinemia. And just like people, it appears as though the culprits are over-eating and lack of exercise.

Insects To Solve Crimes:

Insects make up more than half of the known animal species on our planet and they can be found in all kinds of habitat and feed on all kinds of nutrients. They can even be used in evidence in court cases. So we are talking about forensic entomology. The work of the Forensic Entomology Service in the Department of Zoology and Animal Cell Biology at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU) involves drawing up a census of insect species of forensic interest. These are basically necrophagous diptera, i.e. flies that live on dead tissue, cadavers. Such flies detect a dead body in a question of minutes and at times at a distance of several kilometres. They colonise the cadaver and lay their eggs there. In a matter of hours the larvae are born and the new individuals begin to develop, feeding off the cadaver until they reach full size.

Fossilized Midges Provide Clues To Future Climate Change:

Fossilized midges have helped scientists at the University of Liverpool identify two episodes of abrupt climate change that suggest the UK climate is not as stable as previously thought. The episodes were discovered at a study in Hawes Water in Northern Lancashire, where the team used a unique combination of isotope studies and analysis of fossilized midge heads. Together they indicated where the climate shifts occurred and the temperature of the atmosphere at the time.

Organic Farming Can Feed The World, Study Suggests:

Organic farming can yield up to three times as much food as conventional farming on the same amount of land--according to new findings which refute the long-standing assumption that organic farming methods cannot produce enough food to feed the global population.

A First-principles Model Of Early Evolution:

In a study publishing in PLoS Computational Biology, Shakhnovich et al present a new model of early biological evolution -- the first that directly relates the fitness of a population of evolving model organisms to the properties of their proteins. Key to understanding biological evolution is an important, but elusive, connection, known as the genotype-phenotype relationship, which translates the survival of entire organisms into microscopic selection for particular advantageous genes, or protein sequences. The study of Shakhnovich et al establishes such connections by postulating that the death rate of an organism is determined by the stability of the least stable of their proteins.

Frequent Yeast Infections May Be Linked To Certain Vaginal Bacteria Ecosystems:

University of Idaho study shows normal vaginal biology and conditions that make women prone to diseases. Silence may impact women's health since few women or their doctors are comfortable talking about vaginal health openly. This hesitation, combined with a limited understanding of the differences between women, can lead to misinformation, misdiagnosis and potentially ineffective treatments. Research at the University of Idaho is helping to increase understanding about normal vaginal biology so that physicians can better identify conditions that make women prone to infections and other diseases, and avoid the development of health problems.