Do mothers purposely expose their offspring to their own stress? If so, why? The question arises because it is widely accepted that exposure to maternal stress during pre-natal development can have negative impacts on offspring following birth. To examine why a stressed mother would allow this to happen, evolutionary physiologists Oliver Love and Tony Williams examined how offspring exposure to th...

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute have discovered that a drug used to treat epilepsy and bipolar disorders blocks the formation of plaques that cause Alzheimer`s disease in animal models. The team led by UBC Psychiatry Prof. Weihong Song, who is also the Jack Brown and Family Professor and Chair in Alzheimer`s Disease at UBC, found th...

A new UCLA study adds to mounting evidence that human ovulation — a state once thought to be undetectable without medical equipment — actually prompts a range of subtle but observable behaviors aimed at attracting the best possible mate. The authors show for the first time that women unconsciously change their voices with the approach of ovulation, using a higher, more femini...

The ability to make fire millennia ago was likely a key factor in the migration of prehistoric hominids from Africa into Eurasia, a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute of Archaeology believes on the basis of findings at the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov archaeological site in Israel. Earlier excavations there, carried out under the direction of Prof. Naama Goren-Inbar o...

The assumption that time, weather, and pollution are what cause buildings to decline is only partly true. Bacteria are also responsible for the ageing of buildings and monuments – a process known as biodeterioration, where organisms change the properties of materials through their vital activities. Leonila Laiz from the Institute for Natural Resources and Agrobiology in Seville, Spain, and c...

A team of Johns Hopkins University neuroscientists has discovered patterns of brain activity that may underlie our remarkable ability to see and understand the three-dimensional structure of objects. Computers can beat us at math and chess, but humans are the experts at object vision. (That`s why some Web sites use object recognition tasks as part of their authentication of human users.) It seems ...

These days you can take a photograph with almost every mobile phone. However, using this sort of photo to protect confidential data and send it safely is something new. Ileana Buhan, a PhD student at the University of Twente, has been researching this new way of employing biometrics. She receives her doctorate from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science on 23 Octob...

Researchers have put forward a simple model of development and gene regulation that is capable of explaining patterns observed in the distribution of morphologies and body plans (or, more generally, phenotypes). The study, by Elhanan Borenstein of the Santa Fe Institute and Stanford University and David Krakauer of the Santa Fe Institute was published in this month`s issue of PLoS Computational Bi...

When reaching for an object, the brain prepares neural commands sent to the target muscles to minimize energy expenditure, according to a study published in PLoS Computational Biology by neuroscientists and mathematicians from the INSERM and ENSTA. How the human brain organizes and controls our actions is a crucial question in life sciences. In recent decades, an important theoretical advance has ...

Although we may believe humans know a lot about the Universe, there are still a lot of phenomena to be explained. A team of cosmologists from the University of the Basque Country are searching for the model that best explains the evolution of the Universe. We usually have an image of scientists who study the Universe doing so peering through a telescope. And, effectively, this is what astrophysici...