If you have ever been trading a flurry of text messages with someone and there was an awkward pause, don't assume they are doing some work or have a life, you probably should be suspicious.

An analysis has determined that when people lie in digital messages – texting, social media or instant messaging – they take longer to respond, make more edits and they write shorter responses than usual.

The University of Florida's Blueberry Breeding Program has been developing successful blueberry lines for more than 60 years and those lines are credited with helping to create a Florida blueberry industry that was valued at $48 million in 2010 and for allowing rapid expansion of blueberry production in other subtropical areas of the world.

In the past, blueberry flavor selection in the program was based on two standards: subjective ratings from breeders, and a berry's sugar-to-acid ratio. Recently, scientists have determined that the "eating quality" of blueberries has a much higher correlation to consumer acceptance and indication of "blueberry-like flavor intensity" than the traditional measures of sweetness, acidity, or sugar/acid ratios.

The Sun is a magnetically active star. Its activity manifests itself as dark sunspots and bright faculae - granular structures that are slightly hotter or cooler than the surrounding photosphere - on its visible surface, as well as violent mass ejections and the acceleration of high-energy particles resulting from the release of magnetic energy in its outer atmosphere. 

The frequency with which these phenomena occur varies in a somewhat irregular activity cycle of about 11 years, during which the global magnetic field of the Sun reverses. The solar magnetic field and the activity cycle originate in a self-excited dynamo mechanism based upon convective flows and rotation in the outer third of the solar radius. 

Fat-tailed dwarf lemurs are the only primates that hibernate - and their sleep patterns during hibernation are different from other animals that hibernate, like ground squirrels, which also hibernate at similar temperatures. 

During hibernation, dwarf lemurs experience periods of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep at relatively high ambient temperatures, but no non-REM sleep. Ground squirrels, by contrast, experience only periods of non-REM sleep at high temperatures.

The sleep patterns observed confirm a link between ambient temperature while sleeping and metabolic rate.

The evolution of similar traits in different species, a process known as convergent evolution, is widespread not only at the physical level, but also at the genetic level, and scientists who investigated the genomic basis for echolocation, one of the most well-known examples of convergent evolution, sought to examine the frequency of the process at a genomic level. 

Echolocation is a complex physical trait that involves the production, reception and auditory processing of ultrasonic pulses for detecting unseen obstacles or tracking down prey, and has evolved separately in different groups of bats and cetaceans (including dolphins).

The universe may be constructed in a completely different way than models of today predict. The most widely used model today cannot explain everything in the universe, and therefore there is a need to explore the parts of nature which the model cannot explain.

This research field, new physics, is out to turn our understanding of the universe upside down and the authors of a new paper say they have succeeded in creating a new method that can make it easier to search for new physics in the universe. The method is a scalesetting procedure and it fills out some empty, but very important, holes in the theories, models and simulations, which form the basis for particle physics today. 

Zoological methods of studying behavior patterns in animals have led to insights on people with serious mental disorders.

Prof. David Eilam of
Tel Aviv University
's Zoology Department recorded patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder and "schizo-OCD", which combines symptoms of schizophrenia and OCD, as they performed basic tasks. By analyzing the patients' movements, they were able to identify similarities and differences between two frequently confused disorders.

The research represents a step toward resolving a longstanding question about the nature of schizo-OCD: Is it a combination of OCD and schizophrenia, or a variation of just one of the disorders?