My picks from ScienceDaily

Bioclocks Work By Controlling Chromosome Coiling:

There is a new twist on the question of how biological clocks work. In recent years, scientists have discovered that biological clocks help organize a dizzying array of biochemical processes in the body. Despite a number of hypotheses, exactly how the microscopic pacemakers in every cell in the body exert such a widespread influence has remained a mystery.

Now, a new study provides direct evidence that biological clocks can influence the activity of a large number of different genes in an ingenious fashion, simply by causing chromosomes to coil more tightly during the day and to relax at night.

Is The Beauty Of A Sculpture In The Brain Of The Beholder?:

Is there an objective biological basis for the experience of beauty in art? Or is aesthetic experience entirely subjective? This question has been addressed in a new article by Cinzia Di Dio, Emiliano Macaluso and Giacomo Rizzolatti. The researchers used fMRI scans to study the neural activity in subjects with no knowledge of art criticism, who were shown images of Classical and Renaissance sculptures.

Carnivorous Plants Use Pitchers Of 'Slimy Saliva' To Catch Their Prey:

Carnivorous plants supplement the meager diet available from the nutrient-poor soils in which they grow by trapping and digesting insects and other small arthropods. Pitcher plants of the genus Nepenthes were thought to capture their prey with a simple passive trap but in a paper in PLoS One, Laurence Gaume and Yoel Forterre, a biologist and a physicist from the CNRS, working respectively in the University of Montpellier and the University of Marseille, France show that they employ slimy secretions to doom their victims.

Horses Disperse Alien Plants Along Recreational Trails:

Plant invasions are rapidly becoming a threat to wildlands. One of the ways these aliens are dispersed is through large mammals that forage and excrete seeds in new locations. A new study has found horses to be a source of dispersal along recreational trails in Colorado.

Polar Bears Threatened By Hunting Policy Favoring The Killing Of Male Bears:

Policies that encourage hunters to go after male polar bears in order to conserve females, could make it harder for the animals to find mates. University of Alberta researchers determined there is a critical threshold in the male-to-female ratio. Below it, their model predicts a sudden and rapid collapse in fertilization rates.

Giant Fossil Sea Scorpion Bigger Than Man:

The discovery of a giant fossilised claw from an ancient sea scorpion indicates that when alive it would have been about two and a half meters long, much taller than the average man.

Unraveling the Silky Spider Web:

Web-making spiders employ a host of silk glands to synthesize a variety of silk filaments with different mechanical properties. Although it is widely believed that the aciniform glands are one such silk factory, there has been no hard evidence linking aciniform-derived proteins and silk --until now.