My picks from ScienceDaily

St. Bernard Study Shows Human-directed Evolution At Work:

The St Bernard dog - named after the 11th century priest Bernard of Menthon - is living proof that evolution does occur, say scientists. Biologists at The University of Manchester say that changes to the shape of the breed's head over the years can only be explained through human-directed evolution through selective breeding, an artificial version of natural selection.

Humans And Monkeys Share Machiavellian Intelligence:

When it comes to their social behavior, people sometimes act like monkeys, or more specifically, like rhesus macaques, a type of monkey that shares with humans strong tendencies for nepotism and political maneuvering, according to research by Dario Maestripieri, an expert on primate behavior and an Associate Professor in Comparative Human Development and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago.

Critically Endangered Amur Leopard Captured:

A rare Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis), one of only an estimated 30 left in the wild has been captured and health-checked by experts from a consortium of conservation organizations, before being released.

New Light Trap Captures Larval Stage Of New Species; DNA Barcode Technology Used:

When David Jones, a fisheries oceanographer at the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies (CIMAS) located at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School, set out to design a better light trap to collect young reef fishes, he never imagined his invention would contribute to the discovery of a new species. But, after finding a goby that didn't quite fit any known description, his catch turned out to be the answer to another scientist's twenty-five-year-old research conundrum. The larval stage captured in Jones's new trap was matched to the adult form of a previously unknown species of reef fish by new DNA barcoding technology -- which confirmed both were members of a new species.

More like this

Voracious Grasshoppers Puzzle Texas Entomologists: They're not afraid of heights, they're voracious, and Dr. Spencer Behmer wants to know if you've seen them hanging out in oak trees or on your house. They're post oak grasshoppers, and Behmer, a Texas Agricultural Experiment Station entomologist,…
Dogs Copy Other Dogs' Actions Selectively, The Way Humans Do: A distinguishing feature of human intelligence is our ability to understand the goals and intentions of others. This ability develops gradually during infancy, and the extent to which it is present in other animals is an intriguing…
There are 17 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one…
Trace your genealogy back 25 million years, and you'll meet long-tailed monkey-like primates living in trees. Those primates were not just the ancestors of ourselves, but of all the other apes--chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons--along with the monkeys of the Eastern Hemisphere…