Bright Light Therapy Eases Bipolar Depression For Some:
Bright light therapy can ease bipolar depression in some patients, according to a study published in the journal Bipolar Disorders. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine's Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic studied nine women with bipolar disorder to examine the effects of light therapy in the morning or at midday on mood symptoms.
Insect Attack May Have Finished Off Dinosaurs:
Asteroid impacts or massive volcanic flows might have occurred around the time dinosaurs became extinct, but a new arguemet is that the mightiest creatures the world has ever known may have been brought down by a tiny, much less dramatic force -- biting, disease-carrying insects.
Predator Pressures Maintain Bees' Social Life:
The complex organisation of some insect societies is thought to have developed to such a level that these animals can no longer survive on their own. New research suggests that rather than organisational, genetic, or biological complexity defining a 'point of no return' for social living, pressures of predation create advantages to not living alone.
Two Explosive Evolutionary Events Shaped Early History Of Multicellular Life:
Scientists have known for some time that most major groups of complex animals appeared in the fossils record during the Cambrian Explosion, a seemingly rapid evolutionary event that occurred 542 million years ago. Now Virginia Tech paleontologists, using rigorous analytical methods, have identified another explosive evolutionary event that occurred about 33 million years earlier among macroscopic life forms unrelated to the Cambrian animals. They dubbed this earlier event the "Avalon Explosion."
Why Do Some Animals Live Longer Than Others?:
Why do some live longer than others? Researchers from Leiden University, the Netherlands, turned to tropical African butterflies to find the answer. "The definitive answer is still not known, but our results give an interesting new insight into the evolution of lifespan," says Jeroen Pijpe, first author of a new article.
New Model Of Competitive Speciation Unifies Insights From Earlier Work:
Under which circumstances is sympatric speciation possible? An answer to this long-standing question of evolutionary biology has turned out to be challenging. In particular, models for the evolution of assortative mating under frequency-dependent disruptive selection necessarily depend on a large number of ecological and genetic factors.
Insects' 'Giant Leap' Reconstructed By Founder Of Sociobiology:
The January 2008 issue of BioScience includes an article by biologist Edward O. Wilson that argues for a new perspective on the evolution of advanced social organization in some ants, bees, and wasps (Hymenoptera).
- Log in to post comments