Culture
New study sheds light on whether animal vocalisations, like human words, are constructed from smaller building-blocks.
Findings raise the exciting possibility that the capacity to generate meaning from meaningless building blocks is widespread in animals.
"To our knowledge, this is the first time that the meaning-generating building blocks of a non-human communication system have been experimentally identified", says Prof Simon Townsend of the University of Warwick and Zurich
Scientific analysis of dental calculus - plaque build-up - of the Famine's victims found evidence of corn (maize), oats, potato, wheat and milk foodstuffs.
Surprisingly, they also discovered egg protein in the calculus of three people - more associated with diets of non-labouring or better off social classes at the time.
Researchers analysed calculus on teeth from the human remains of 42 people, aged approximately 13 years and older who died in the Kilkenny Union Workhouse and were buried in mass burial pits on its grounds.
CATONSVILLE, MD, September 9, 2019 - Conventional wisdom in the startup community is that with the right incentives, the venture can meet and exceed expectations, and a major component of this is how you structure your contracts for founders and early employees.
New research has found that when it comes to those contracts, it may be less about incentive, and more about identifying the right people to incentivize.
For the nearly 20 million U.S. adults who are addicted to drugs or alcohol, no effective medical treatment exists--despite plentiful scientific knowledge surrounding the factors that trigger relapse.
It's a quandary that prompted a research quest for Nobuyoshi Suto, PhD, of Scripps Research's Department of Neuroscience.
Cold Spring Harbor, NY -- Cancer is relentless and resilient. When a drug blocks a cancer cell's main survival pathway, the cell avoids the obstacle by taking different pathways or detours to save itself. This tactic is called "developing resistance," and it's one of the key challenges researchers face when seeking effective therapeutics to combat pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA).
High schools where students are more connected to peers and adult staff, and share strong relationships with the same adults, have lower rates of suicide attempts, according to a new study published by the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
BOSTON - Puerto Rican teens growing up as minorities in the South Bronx are more likely to experience anxiety and depression than their peers growing up as a majority in Puerto Rico, even under similar conditions of poverty, says a new study in World Psychiatry. Researchers looked at nearly 2,000 Puerto Rican youth over two decades to understand how minority status and factors such as racism, poverty, violence and social support influence mental health.
True or false? Bacteria living in the same space, like the mouth, have evolved collaborations so generous that they are not possible with outside bacteria. That was long held to be true, but in a new, large-scale study of microbial interactions, the resounding answer was "false."
Nearly two decades ago, a gene therapy restored vision to Lancelot, a Briard dog who was born with a blinding disease. This ushered in a period of hope and progress for the field of gene therapy aimed at curing blindness, which culminated in the 2017 approval of a gene therapy that improved vision in people with Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), a rare, inherited form of blindness closely related to the condition seen in Lancelot. It represents the first FDA-approved gene therapy for an inherited genetic disease.
Much remains mysterious about the factors influencing human inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), but one aspect that has emerged as a key contributor is the gut microbiome, the collection of microorganisms dwelling in the intestines.
Diet is known to profoundly affect this microbial community, and special diets have been used as therapies for intestinal disorders including Crohn's disease in people. They're also commonly used in dogs, which can develop a chronic intestinal disease that mirrors many features of Crohn's.
A new Dartmouth study on how we use reward information for making choices shows how humans and monkeys adopt their decision-making strategies depending on the uncertainty of information present.
Recent technological advancement has seen the development and utilization of photodetectors in different applications, including biological detection and image sensing. Polymer photodetectors (PPDs), in particular, have attracted significant attention owing to the numerous desirable properties and technological advantages of polymer semiconductors, i.e., adjustable energy levels, mechanical flexibility, large-area fabrication, solution process, and low cost.
There are more different kinds of beetle than just about any other kind of animal--scientists have described about 5,800 different species of mammals, compared with nearly 400,000 species of beetles. Of those 400,000 kinds of beetles, more than 64,000 species are members of the rove beetle family, staphylinidae. These mostly small earwig-looking insects are found all over the world, and they've been around since the time of the dinosaurs. But scientists are still figuring out exactly when rove beetles first evolved.
The Epstein Barr virus (EBV) is very widespread. More than 90 percent of the world's population is infected - with very different consequences. Although the infection does not usually affect people, in some it can cause glandular fever or various types of cancer. Researchers at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) have now discovered why different virus strains cause very divergent courses of disease.
While using a wearable device alone may not always be enough to motivate more exercise, adding fun and competition can be the catalyst needed to drive real results, according to a new study from researchers at Penn Medicine and Deloitte Consulting LLP. The two teams combined behavioral insights, gaming elements such as points and levels, and social elements like support, collaboration, or competition to generate significantly positive results in a workplace physical activity program.