My picks from ScienceDaily

Scientists Map Penguins From Space By Locating Their Feces:

Penguin poo (guano) stains, visible from space, have helped British scientists locate emperor penguin breeding colonies in Antarctica. Knowing their location provides a baseline for monitoring their response to environmental change.

New Hominid 12 Million Years Old Found In Spain, With 'Modern' Facial Features:

Researchers have discovered a fossilized face and jaw from a previously unknown hominoid primate genus in Spain dating to the Middle Miocene era, roughly 12 million years ago. Nicknamed "Lluc," the male bears a strikingly "modern" facial appearance with a flat face, rather than a protruding one. The finding sheds important new light on the evolutionary development of hominids, including orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and humans.

Mosquito Evolution Spells Trouble For Galapagos Wildlife:

The Galapagos giant tortoise and other iconic wildlife are facing a new threat from disease, as some of the islands' mosquitoes develop a taste for reptile blood.

Temporary Infidelity May Contribute To Stability Of Ancient Relationships:

Fungus-farming ants have cultivated the same fungal crops for 50 million years. Each young ant queen carries a bit of fungus garden with her when she flies away to mate and establish a new nest. Short breaks in the ants' relationship with the fungus during nest establishment may contribute to the stability of this long-term mutualism, according to a study at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Gamboa, Panama.

Counting Sheep In Climate Change Predictions:

Climate change can have devastating effects on endangered species, but new mathematical models may be able to aid conservation of a population of bighorn sheep.

Culture, Not Biology, Underpins Math Gender Gap:

For more than a century, the notion that females are innately less capable than males at doing mathematics, especially at the highest levels, has persisted in even the loftiest circles.

Can Mathematicians Spot The Winning Team Better Than Sports Commentators?:

Jack Brimberg and Bill Hurley of The Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario, point out that sports commentators will often argue the importance of scoring the first goal and often suggest that a team improves its chances of winning considerably by scoring it. This kind of punditry more commonly arises during playoff games which tend to be played more defensively. However, although the total number of goals scored in a soccer or hockey match is usually small, Brimberg and Hurley wanted to find out whether that first goal is all important or not. They have done this by calculating the probability of the first-goal team winning at discrete points in the match after the first goal is scored based on the number of minutes remaining in the game. They also take overtime into account to adjust the weighting on their formula appropriately.

Gene For Day Blindness In Dachshunds Found:

A PhD project by Anne Caroline Wiik has discovered the genetic cause of day blindness or "cone-rod dystrophy" in the wire-haired dachshund. The disease was discovered in two litter mates in 1999 and has since been studied in both clinical and genetic trials in offspring of these.

Canaries That Hear Poor Songs As Juveniles Nevertheless Sing Rather Normal Songs As Adults:

Many songbirds learn their songs early in life from a role model. In the absence of an appropriate tutor, they develop an improvised song that often lacks the species-typical song structure. However, male canaries even learn to sing normal songs when they were exposed as juveniles to tutors that lacked the features of normal canary song, as researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology have now found out.

When Evolution Is Not So Slow And Gradual:

What's the secret to surviving during times of environmental change? Evolve...quickly. A new article in The American Naturalist finds that guppy populations introduced into new habitats developed new and advantageous traits in just a few years. This is one of only a few studies to look at adaptation and survival in a wild population.

Not Just Through The Eyes: Squid 'Sight' Offers Insight Into Treating Human Eye Diseases:

It's hard to miss the huge eye of a squid. But now it appears that certain squids can detect light through an organ other than their eyes as well.

Insomniac Flies Resemble Sleep-deprived Humans:

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have created a line of fruit flies that may someday help shed light on the mechanisms that cause insomnia in humans. The flies, which only get a small fraction of the sleep of normal flies, resemble insomniac humans in several ways.