My picks from ScienceDaily

Crafting Your Image For Your 1,000 Friends On Facebook Or MySpace:

Students are creating idealized versions of themselves on social networking websites -- Facebook and MySpace are the most popular -- and using these sites to explore their emerging identities, UCLA psychologists report. Parents often understand very little about this phenomenon, they say.

Oh, What A Feeling! Regaining Ability To Interpret Emotions After Severe Brain Injury:

People who have lost the ability to interpret emotion after a severe brain injury can regain this vital social skill by being re-educated to read body language, facial expressions and voice tone in others, according to a new study.

Behavior Very Similar In Distracted Humans And Rats On Neurotransmitter Blocker:

When picking through a basket of fruit, it doesn't seem very difficult to recognize a green pear from a green apple. This is easy, thanks to "feature binding"-- a process by which our brain combines all of the specific features of an object and gives us a complete and unified picture of it.

Is A Stradivarius Violin Better Than Other Violins?:

Some sell for more than $3.5 million. Only 700 of them exist, and they're stored in vaults, frequently stolen and often counterfeited. The object in question? Stradivarius violins, constructed by famed Italian instrument-maker Antonio Stradivari between 1680 and 1720. Treasured for possessing sublime acoustic properties, these rare instruments have spawned dozens of theories attempting to explain their legendary tone, and luthiers, makers of stringed instruments, are still trying to reproduce it.

When It Comes To What's For Dinner, Baboon Society Is No Democracy:

In decisions about where to eat, baboons don't all have an equal say, according to a report in the November 20th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Rather, most baboons in a group will follow their leader to a dining spot of his choosing, even if it means a considerably more meager meal for themselves than they could have had otherwise.

Ability To Quit Smoking May Depend On ADHD Symptoms, Researchers Find:

Tobacco use is more prevalent and smoking cessation less likely among persons with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (A.D.H.D.). In a study of smokers with attention deficit and hyperactivity symptoms, those who exhibited elevated hyperactivity and impulsivity, with or without inattention, showed lower quit rates after 8 weeks than those with inattention symptoms alone or those without the A.D.H.D. symptoms.

Beauty Is Truth In Mathematical Intuition: First Empirical Evidence:

Rolf Reber, together with mathematician Morten Brun and psychologist Karoline Mitterndorfer, all from the University of Bergen, Norway, have reported first empirical evidence for the use of beauty as truth and they have provided an explanation for this phenomenon, based on the processing fluency theory of beauty.