My picks from ScienceDaily

Mini Dinosaurs Prowled North America:

Massive predators like Albertosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex may have been at the top of the food chain, but they were not the only meat-eating dinosaurs to roam North America, according to Canadian researchers who have discovered the smallest dinosaur species on the continent to date. Their work is also helping re-draw the picture of North America's ecosystem at the height of the dinosaur age 75 million years ago.

Where Does Consciousness Come From?:

Consciousness arises as an emergent property of the human mind. Yet basic questions about the precise timing, location and dynamics of the neural event(s) allowing conscious access to information are not clearly and unequivocally determined.

Elephant Shark Genome Sequence Leads To Discovery Of Color Perception In Deep-sea Fish:

The elephant shark, a primitive deep-sea fish that belongs to the oldest living family of jawed vertebrates, can see color much like humans can. This discovery, published in the March 2009 issue of Genome Research, may enhance scientists' understanding of how color vision evolved in early vertebrates over the last 450 million years of evolution.

Animal Families With The Most Diversity Also Have Widest Range Of Size:

Somewhere out there in the ocean, SpongeBob SquarePants has a teeny-tiny cousin and a humongous uncle. That's just what one would expect from a new analysis of body sizes across all orders of animal life that was conducted by researchers at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), in Durham, N.C. and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Developing Fruit Fly Embryo Is Capable Of Genetic Corrections:

Animals have an astonishing ability to develop reliably in spite of variable conditions during embryogenesis. New research, published in parallel this week in PLoS Biology and PLoS Computational Biology, addresses how living things can develop into precise, adult forms when there is so much variation present during their development stages.

Tree-eating Bugs Seen By Satellite As They Denude Invasive Tamarisk Trees In Southwest U.S.:

More than 150 years after a small Eurasian tree named tamarisk or saltcedar started taking over river banks throughout the U.S. Southwest, saltcedar leaf beetles were unleashed to defoliate the exotic invader. Now, University of Utah scientists say their new study shows it is feasible to use satellite data to monitor the extent of the beetle's attack on tamarisk, and whether use of the beetles may backfire with unintended environmental consequences.

More Evidence That Intelligence Is Largely Inherited: Researchers Find That Genes Determine Brain's Processing Speed:

They say a picture tells a thousand stories, but can it also tell how smart you are? Actually, say UCLA researchers, it can. In a study published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience, UCLA neurology professor Paul Thompson and colleagues used a new type of brain-imaging scanner to show that intelligence is strongly influenced by the quality of the brain's axons, or wiring that sends signals throughout the brain. The faster the signaling, the faster the brain processes information. And since the integrity of the brain's wiring is influenced by genes, the genes we inherit play a far greater role in intelligence than was previously thought.

Guitarists' Brains Swing Together:

When musicians play along together it isn't just their instruments that are in time - their brain waves are too. New research shows how EEG readouts from pairs of guitarists become more synchronized, a finding with wider potential implications for how our brains interact when we do.

'Short-sleepers' May Develop Blood Sugar Abnormality That Can Lead To Diabetes:

People who sleep less than six hours a night appear to have a higher risk of developing impaired fasting glucose -- a condition that can precede type 2 diabetes, researchers reported at the American Heart Association's 49th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention.