My picks from ScienceDaily

Dark Chocolate Is More Filling Than Milk Chocolate And Lessens Cravings:

New research at the Faculty of Life Sciences (LIFE) at the University of Copenhagen - shows that dark chocolate is far more filling than milk chocolate, lessening our craving for sweet, salty and fatty foods. In other words, eating dark chocolate may be an efficient way to keep your weight down over the holidays.

A Walk In The Park A Day Keeps Mental Fatigue Away:

If you spend the majority of your time among stores, restaurants and skyscrapers, it may be time to trade in your stilettos for some hiking boots. A new study in Psychological Science reveals that spending time in nature may be more beneficial for mental processes than being in urban environments.

Are Power And Compassion Mutually Exclusive?:

The fact that many cultures emphasize the concept of "noblesse oblige" (the idea that with great power and prestige come responsibilities) suggests that power may diminish a tendency to help others. Psychologist Gerben A. van Kleef (University of Amsterdam) and his colleagues from University of California, Berkeley, examined how power influences emotional reactions to the suffering of others.

Women Prefer Prestige Over Dominance In Mates:

A new study in the journal Personal Relationships reveals that women prefer mates who are recognized by their peers for their skills, abilities, and achievements, while not preferring men who use coercive tactics to subordinate their rivals. Indeed, women found dominance strategies of the latter type to be attractive primarily when men used them in the context of male-male athletic competitions.

Racial Tension In A 'Split Second':

Interracial and interethnic interactions can often be awkward and stressful for members of both majority and minority groups. People bring certain expectations to their interactions with members of different groups--they often expect that these interactions will be awkward and less successful in establishing positive, long-lasting relationships than interactions with members of one's own racial or ethnic group.

Gender Gap In Spatial Skills Starts In Infancy, Psychologists Report:

Men tend to perform better than women at tasks that require rotating an object mentally, studies have indicated. Now, developmental psychologists at Pitzer College and UCLA have discovered that this type of spatial skill is present in infancy and can be found in boys as young as 5 months old.

Cognitive Computing: Building A Machine That Can Learn From Experience:

Suppose you want to build a computer that operates like the brain of a mammal. How hard could it be? After all, there are supercomputers that can decode the human genome, play chess and calculate prime numbers out to 13 million digits.

Evolution: Life On Earth Got Bigger In 2-million-fold Leaps:

Extremes are exciting. Does anyone really think dinosaurs would capture our imagination the way they do if they hadn't been so huge? You don't see natural history museums vying for fossil skeletons of prehistoric rodents. It's the Tyrannosaurus rex fossils they salivate and squabble over. And would the Hollywood glitterati cart around those little teacup pups if they weren't so dang tiny and cute? Not likely.

Earth's creatures come in all sizes, yet they (and we) all sprang from the same single-celled organisms that first populated the planet. So how on Earth did life go from bacteria to the blue whale?

"It happened primarily in two great leaps, and each time, the maximum size of life jumped up by a factor of about a million," said Jonathan Payne, assistant professor of geological and environmental science at Stanford.

Payne, along with a dozen other paleontologists and ecologists at 10 different research institutions, pooled their existing databases, combed the scientific literature and consulted with taxonomic experts in a quest to determine the maximum size of life over all of geological time.