My Picks From ScienceDaily

Horses Suffer From Obesity, Just Like Humans:

Horses are inheritably couch potatoes. An overeating, slothful horse leads to an obese horse. Unlike humans, however, horse owners often don't see the dangers of an obese horse. Caretakers may see no harm in giving their horses rich foods, but obesity in horses is just as unhealthy as obesity in humans and can lead to fatal diseases.

The Power Of Speaking Ladylike:

Does gender make a difference in the way politicians speak and are spoken to? This is the question posed in a new study¹ by Dr. Carmelia Suleiman and Daniel O'Connell from Florida International University published this week in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. The study of transcripts of three television and two radio interviews of Bill and Hillary Clinton provided Suleiman with a unique opportunity to study perspectives of two politicians and their interviewers and whether or not they were affected by gender.

Sea Snails Break The Law:

Lizards gave rise to legless snakes. Cave fishes don't have eyeballs. In evolution, complicated structures often get lost. Dollo's Law states that complicated structures can't be re-evolved because the genes that code for them were lost or have mutated. A group of sea snails breaks Dollo's law, Rachel Collin, Staff Scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and colleagues from two Chilean universities announce in the April, 2007, Biological Bulletin.

More like this

Time always marches forward, of course, but does evolution? It's certainly easy to impose a march of progress on the course of evolution. That's why the sequence of apes transforming into humans as they march from left to right is so universal. Of course, there are also pictures in which Homo…
Voracious Sponges In Underwater Caves Save Reefs: Tropical oceans are known as the deserts of the sea. And yet this unlikely environment is the very place where the rich and fertile coral reef grows. Dutch researcher Jasper de Goeij investigated how caves in the coral reef ensure the reef's…
First Successful Reverse Vasectomy On Endangered Species Performed At The National Zoo: Veterinarians at the Smithsonian's National Zoo performed the first successful reverse vasectomy on a Przewalski's horse (E. ferus przewalskii; E. caballus przewalskii--classification debated), pronounced zshah-…
Hint for science journalists: if the hook to get readers to pay attention to your story is to warn them to sit down because a 19th century "law" of evolution has been shown to be wrong, you're going to irritate scientists, who will then write rude blog posts sneering at your writing. That's the…