My picks from ScienceDaily

Melatonin May Save Eyesight In Inflammatory Disease, Study Suggests:

Current research suggests that melatonin therapy may help treat uveitis, a common inflammatory eye disease. People with uveitis develop sudden redness and pain in their eyes, and their vision rapidly deteriorates. Untreated, uveitis can lead to permanent vision loss, accounting for an estimated 10-15% of cases of blindness in the US. Uveitis has a wide variety of causes, including eye injury, cancer, infection, and autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. There is currently no optimal treatment for uveitis. Corticoid steroid eye drops are often used; however, long-term corticoid use has many negative side effects, including the possible development of glaucoma.

Beetles May Be Source Of Food-Borne Pathogens In Broiler Flocks:

A new study suggests that darkling beetles and their larvae can transmit harmful food-borne pathogens to chicks in broiler houses in successive rearing cycles.

It Takes Guts To Build Bone, Scientists Discover:

Bone growth is controlled in the gut through serotonin, the same naturally present chemical used by the brain to influence mood, appetite and sleep, according to a new discovery from researchers at Columbia University Medical Center. Until now, the skeleton was thought to control bone growth, and serotonin was primarily known as a neurotransmitter acting in the brain. This new insight could transform how osteoporosis is treated in the future by giving doctors a way to increase bone mass, not just slow its loss.

Cells Reorganize Shape To Fit The Situation, Scientists Discover:

Flip open any biology textbook and you're bound to see a complicated diagram of the inner workings of a cell, with its internal scaffolding, the cytoskeleton, and how it maintains a cell's shape. Yet the fundamental question remains, which came first: the shape, or the skeleton? Now a research team led by Phong Tran, PhD, Assistant Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, has the answer: both.

Cleanliness Makes People Less Severe In Moral Judgments:

New research in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science has found that the physical notion of cleanliness significantly reduces the severity of moral judgments, showing that intuition, rather than deliberate reasoning can influence our perception of what is right and wrong.

Using Challenging Concepts To Learn Promotes Understanding Of New Material:

It's a question that confronts parents and teachers everywhere- what is the best method of teaching kids new skills? Is it better for children to learn gradually, starting with easy examples and slowly progressing to more challenging problems? Or is it more effective to just dive-in head first with difficult problems, and then move on to easier examples? Although conventional wisdom suggests that the best way to learn a difficult skill is to progress from easier problems to more difficult ones, research examining this issue has resulted in mixed outcomes.