My Picks From ScienceDaily

Living Fossils Have Long- And Short-term Memory Despite Lacking Brain Structures Of Modern Cephalopods:

Robyn Crook from the City University of New York reports that Nautilus, the ancient living ancestors of modern cephalopods, have both long and short-term memory, despite lacking the brain structures that modern cephalopods evolved for long-term memory.

Slide Rule Sense: Amazonian Indigenous Culture Demonstrates Universal Mapping Of Number Onto Space:

The ability to map numbers onto a line, a foundation of all mathematics, is universal, says a study published May 30 in the journal Science, but the form of this universal mapping is not linear but logarithmic. The findings illuminate both the nature and the limits of the human predisposition to measurement, a foundation for science, engineering, and much of our modern culture.

Scientists Discover Stinging Truths About Jellyfish Blooms In The Bering Sea:

A new study helps explain a cyclic increase and decrease of jellyfish populations, which transformed parts of the Bering Sea--one of the U.S.'s most productive fisheries--into veritable jellytoriums during the 1990s.

How People Influence Connectivity Among Ecosystems:

Ecosystems are constantly exchanging materials through the movement of air in the atmosphere, the flow of water in rivers and the migration of animals across the landscape. People, however, have also established themselves as another major driver of connectivity among ecosystems.

Taxonomists Describe The Top 10 Most Surprising Species Discovered In 2007:

Each year the scientific community identifies around 17,000 new animals and plants. To attract people's attention on the discovery of species, a key for their evolution, survival and conservation, an international committee of experts has just published a list of the 10 most curious and surprising species described in 2007.

How To Construct A 'Firefly' Worm:

Research describing a new modified luminescent worm allows, for the first time, one to measure, in real time, the metabolism of an entire living organism. The key behind this capacity relies in the fact that the luminescence is produced using the animal's available energy, which reflects its metabolism that, as such, can be extrapolated from measuring the emitted light.

Healthy Parents Provide Clues To Survival Of Young Haddock On Georges Bank:

In 2003, haddock on Georges Bank experienced the largest baby boom ever documented for the stock, with an estimated 800 million new young fish entering the population. With typical annual averages of 50 to 100 million new fish in the last few decades, fisheries biologists have been puzzled by the huge increase and its ramifications for stock management. They have been looking for answers and may have found one - healthy adults.

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Early neuropsychology research indicated that long-term memory and short-term memory were separable - in other words, long-term memory could be impaired by damage to the hippocampus without any corresponding deficits in short-term memory. However, this idea has come under scrutiny in recent years…