My picks from ScienceDaily

Thinking People Eat Too Much: Intellectual Work Found To Induce Excessive Calorie Intake:

A Universite Laval research team has demonstrated that intellectual work induces a substantial increase in calorie intake. The details of this discovery, which could go some way to explaining the current obesity epidemic, are published in the most recent issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.

Children With TVs Or Computers In Their Room Sleep Less:

Middle school children who have a television or computer in their room sleep less during the school year, watch more TV, play more computer games and surf the net more than their peers who don't - reveals joint research conducted by the University of Haifa and Jezreel Valley College.

Hallucinations In The Flash Of An Eye:

Ever seen or heard something that wasn't there? For most of us such experiences - termed hallucinations - are a normal, fleeting, brain glitch; yet for a few they are persistent, distressing and associated with a range of psychiatric, neurological and eye conditions.

Yale Researchers Find 'Junk DNA' May Have Triggered Key Evolutionary Changes In Human Thumb And Foot:

Out of the 3 billion genetic letters that spell out the human genome, Yale scientists have found a handful that may have contributed to the evolutionary changes in human limbs that enabled us to manipulate tools and walk upright.

More like this

I've got an article in today's New York Times about one of my perennial fascinationsmusical hallucinations.
Hallucinations are often associated with psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia or with LSD and related drugs.
Vaughan Bell, of Mindhacks fame, wrote a really interesting article on "post-bereavement ghosts" over at Mind Matters.
There's an interesting case study in The Lancet, about a woman who began hearing voices with speech impairments following a bicycle accident.

Nice picks. The hallucination link led to fascinating articles on music's effect on the brain.

I have to say, however, a study that simply concludes kids that have tv and computers use them more is not real impressive.

"I think; therefore I'm fat." Take that, all you skinny numbskulls!

"Junk DNA": I have always hated that term. By analogy, you could say that a majority of the Earth's people are "junk humans" because they don't change civilization. Scientists would have been much better off calling it "unexplained DNA sequences" or "DNA of unknown function."

Probably we'll be discovering a lot of effects of this body of sequences over the next few decades.

Oh well, it was probably a term coined by some "junk scientists" anyway ;)