My Picks From ScienceDaily

Mathematics Might Save You A Trip To The ER:

Since the days of Hippocrates, people have known that certain illnesses come and go with the seasons. More recently, researchers have learned that these cyclic recurrences of disease, known as seasonality, are often related to the weather. In order to accurately predict when outbreaks of disease will occur, and how many people will be effected, Elena Naumova, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Public Heath and Family Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, and colleagues, are studying seasonality by creating mathematical models based on environmental factors like outdoor temperature.

Shape Encoding May Start In The Retina:

New evidence from the University of Southern California suggests that there may be dedicated cells in the retina that help compile small bits of information in order to recognize objects. The research was conducted by Ernest Greene, professor of psychology in the area of brain and cognitive sciences at USC. It is well established that the images the observer sees are divided in half as they are sent to the two hemispheres of the brain. When a person looks at the center of an object, the image from the right half of the object will be sent to one hemisphere of the brain and the image of the left half is sent to the other. This is true whether a person uses one eye or two to look at the object. "Given that the primary visual areas in each hemisphere are seeing only half of the object, it has been assumed that communication between the hemispheres was needed to combine the information," said Greene.

What Makes One Wasp Queen? Old Developmental Pathways Spawn Revolutionary Evolutionary Changes:

When the larvae of the primitive social insect Polistes metricus, a paper wasp, slips into the quiet pupal stage, she doesn't know if she'll arise a worker or gyne (future queen) -- unless she consults with Arizona State University's social insect researcher Gro Amdam. Amdam's group is shedding new light on the development of colonial insects from solitary ancestors through study of a primitive social order of wasps. In a paper highlighted on the cover and published Aug. 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), ASU's Amdam and Florian Wolschin teamed up with Kari Norberg, from Amdam's laboratory at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, and James Hunt and others from the University of Missouri. They reveal that the Polistes larvae that can become future queens show signs of developmental diapause, a period of overt quiescence and a life history trait of many insect orders.