[ScienceDaily]
Roxina Soler and her colleagues have discovered that subterranean and aboveground herbivorous insects can communicate with each other by using plants as telephones. Subterranean insects issue chemical warning signals via the leaves of the plant. This way, aboveground insects are alerted that the plant is already "occupied."

[National Geographic]
An 87-million-year-old praying mantis found encased in amber in Japan may be a "missing link" between mantises from the Cretaceous period and modern-day insects.

[TimesOnline]
Analysis of protein preserved within a fossil Tyrannosaurus rex bone has provided molecular evidence to support the theory that dinosaurs evolved into birds.

[Scientific American]
Is open access science the future?

[darwin-online.org.uk]
The complete works of Charles Darwin online.

[BBC News]
Researchers have shown that marigolds can grow in crushed rock very like the lunar surface, with no need for plant food.

[PLoS Biology]
Researchers say endocrine-disrupting chemicals can permanently harm the developing organism and may even promote obesity. But the chemical industry doesn't want you to believe them.

[Celemony.com]
For the first time in audio recording history you can identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material. The unique access that Melodyne affords to pitch, timing, note lengths and other parameters of melodic notes will now also be afforded to individual notes within chords. [Fascinating demo video]

[Los Angeles Times]
U.S. regulators halt commercial salmon season to try to protect slumping chinook population off California and Oregon. Going fishing this year would be like a farmer eating his seed corn.

[Tom's Hardware]
The FCC has issued fines against Wal-Mart, Sears, Circuit City, Target, Best Buy and others for failing to meet requirements concerning the digital TV conversion next year. Additionally, the governmental organization imposed fines on TV manufacturers for continuing to ship analog tuners after the deadline and for not meeting other digital TV guidelines.

[Times Online]
The internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds at speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection.

[Telegraph.co.uk]
A Californian team has developed a new generation of memory, dubbed "racetrack memory," that combines the high performance and reliability of solid state flash memory, stored in microchips, with the high capacity of the PC's hard disk drive, which is cheap but contains moving parts and is slow.

[Physorg.com]
Alligator blood could provide a powerful new source of antibiotics for fighting deadly "superbugs" and other infections.

[ars technica]
This new core microarchitecture, codenamed Nehalem, forms the basic building block from which Intel will assemble the brains for everything from high-end servers to svelte notebooks. Insofar as Nehalem represents a lot more than just a new processor, it's a significant shift for Intel at almost every level.

[Wired]
Will the big personal liberty issues of the 21^st century be over the civil rights of the mind?

[Bloomberg.com]
Mud clay, used as a folk remedy to heal wounds, soothe indigestion and beautify the complexion, may help doctors fight drug-resistant infections. In tests of more than 30 clay samples from around the world, researchers found clays from Oregon and Nevada that killed almost all the cells of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus auereus, a staph infection that can be fatal.

[Vanity Fair]
Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics—ruthless legal battles against small farmers—is its decades-long history of toxic contamination.

[Scientific American]
For the first time, researchers have developed a way to view stem cells in the brains of living animals, including humans—a finding that allows scientists to follow the process neurogenesis (the birth of neurons). The discovery comes just months after scientists confirmed that such cells are generated in adult as well as developing brains.

[BBC News]
Europe's sophisticated new space truck, the ATV, has docked with the International Space Station: This is a first in the world - this is a fully automatic spacecraft that docked with the space station, totally under its own control, and that's never been done before by anybody at all; so from a purely technical point of view, it's really quite incredible.