A Blog Around The Clock

Why Face Symmetry Is Sexy Across Cultures And Species:

In humans, faces are an important source of social information. One property of faces that is rapidly noticed is attractiveness. Research has highlighted symmetry and sexual dimorphism (how masculine or feminine a face is) as important variables that determine a face's attractiveness.

Platypus Genome Explains Animal's Peculiar Features; Holds Clues To Evolution Of Mammals:

The duck-billed platypus: part bird, part reptile, part mammal -- and the genome to prove it.

Biodiversity: It's In The Water:

What if hydrology is more important for predicting biodiversity than biology? New research challenges current thinking about biodiversity and opens up new avenues for predicting how climate change or human activity may affect biodiversity patterns.

When Bears Steal Human Food, Mom's Not To Blame:

Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) found that the black bears that become habituated to human food and garbage may not be learning these behaviors exclusively from their mothers, as widely assumed. Bears that steal human food sources are just as likely to form these habits on their own or pick them up from unrelated, "bad influence" bears.

Mathematics Simplifies Sleep Monitoring:

A UQ researcher has created a new way to measure breathing patterns in sleeping infants which may also work for adults.

It Might Be True That 'Men Marry Their Mothers':

Whether a young man's mother earned a college degree and whether she worked outside the home while he was growing up seems to have an effect years later when he considers his ideal wife, according to a study by University of Iowa sociologist Christine Whelan.

Does The Brain Control Muscles Or Movements?:

One of the major scientific questions about the brain is how it can translate the simple intent to perform an action--say, reach for a glass--into the dynamic, coordinated symphony of muscle movements required for that action. The neural instructions for such actions originate in the brain's primary motor cortex, and the puzzle has been whether the neurons in this region encode the details of individual muscle activities or the high-level commands that govern kinetics--the direction and velocity of desired movements.

Killer Competition: Neurons Duke It Out For Survival:

The developing nervous system makes far more nerve cells than are needed to ensure target organs and tissues are properly connected to the nervous system. As nerves connect to target organs, they somehow compete with each other resulting in some living and some dying. Now, using a combination of computer modeling and molecular biology, neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins have discovered how the target tissue helps newly connected peripheral nerve cells strengthen their connections and kill neighboring nerves. The study was published in the April 18th issue of Science.