My picks from ScienceDaily

Plant Communication: Sagebrush Engage In Self-recognition And Warn Of Danger:

To thine own self be true" may take on a new meaning--not with people or animal behavior but with plant behavior. Plants engage in self-recognition and can communicate danger to their "clones" or genetically identical cuttings planted nearby, says professor Richard Karban of the Department of Entomology, University of California, Davis, in groundbreaking research published in the current edition of Ecology Letters.

Mate Selection: Honesty In Advertising Pays Off:

Throughout the animal kingdom brilliant colors or elaborate behavioral displays serve as "advertisements" for attracting mates. But, what do the ads promise, and is there truth in advertizing? Researchers at Yale theorize that when males must provide care for the survival of their offspring, the males' signals will consistently be honest -- and they may devote more of their energy to caring for their offspring than to being attractive.

First Image Of Memories Being Made:

The ability to learn and to establish new memories is essential to our daily existence and identity; enabling us to navigate through the world. A new study by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro), McGill University and University of California, Los Angeles has captured an image for the first time of a mechanism, specifically protein translation, which underlies long-term memory formation.

Online Tutorials Help Elementary School Teachers Make Sense Of Science:

Interactive Web-based science tutorials can be effective tools for helping elementary school teachers construct powerful explanatory models of difficult scientific concepts, and research shows the interactive tutorials are just as effective online as they are in face-to-face settings, says a University of Illinois expert in science education.

Using Math To Take The Lag Out Of Jet Lag:

Researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the University of Michigan have developed a software program that prescribes a regimen for avoiding jet lag using timed light exposure.

Teens Are Heading In Wrong Direction: Likely To Have Sex, But Not Use Contraception:

Between 2003 and 2007, the progress made in the 1990s and early 2000s in improving teen contraceptive use and reducing teen pregnancy and childbearing stalled, and may even have reversed among certain groups of teens, according to a new study. Between 1991 and 2003, teens' condom use increased while their use of no contraceptive method declined, leading to a decreased risk of pregnancy and to declines in teen pregnancy and childbearing. The new findings paint a very different picture since 2003.

How We Recognize What Is True And What Is False:

A recent neuroimaging study reveals that the ability to distinguish true from false in our daily lives involves two distinct processes. Previous research relied heavily on the premise that true and false statements are both processed in the left inferior frontal cortex. Carried out by researchers from the Universities of Lisbon and Vita-Salute, Milan, the June Cortex study found that we use two separate processes to determine the subtle distinctions between true and false in our daily lives.

Method For Computing Evolutionary Trees Could Revolutionize Evolutionary Biology:

Detailed, accurate evolutionary trees that reveal the relatedness of living things can now be determined much faster and for thousands of species with a computing method developed by computer scientists and a biologist at The University of Texas at Austin.