neurobiological evidence of pulvinar neuron responses to a potential predation threat is convincing, Dobson noted more work is needed to support a role for snakes in primate evolution.

“fear module” in the primate brain—a construct that enables “quick responses to stimuli that signal danger, such as predators and threatening faces”

“Since they [the authors] haven’t—to my knowledge—tested the same stimuli on various other parts of the visual system, they don’t have evidence that these putatively selective cells are a specialization of the ‘fear module’ at all,”

offers new insights into the contributions made by the fungus to plant degradation

identification of enzymes capable of degrading lignocelluloses could also be a boon for the biofuels industry. Biofuel companies already use enzyme blends to break down starches from plant biomass, most commonly corn, into sugars to be fermented into ethanol. But the enzymes currently available can’t break down tough-to-degrade molecules such as lignocelluloses on an industrial scale.

idea is that the genes coding for these enzymes in the fungus gardens of leafcutter ants can be mass-produced in the lab by inserting them into E. coli or yeast, then used to break down feedstocks that require less land, fewer resources, and that don’t compete with food crops. “This is a highly evolved system, so the hypothesis is that the enzymes would be highly tuned to break down plant biomass,”

researchers will also need to take into account the role of bacteria. “It could be that bacteria are producing some enzymes that enhance the efficacy of the fungal enzymes,” says Aylward. “Integrating the bacterial component is likely to be important, because the synergism we see with leafcutter gardens is on the level of the entire symbiosis.”

potential for creating children from multiple parents is not limited to the halting of the passage of mitochondrial disorders.

these genetic engineering procedures raise both legal and ethical concerns. Legal issues include: Who are the legal parents of a child generated from genetic material obtained from multiple donors? Would such a child have the right to know the identity of all his gene donors? In an article to be published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender (in press), we propose a legal solution to address some of these issues

many ethical concerns raised by such technologies is whether these advances in reproductive medicine could lead to the creation of “designer babies,” in which parents select the genetic composition of their children for enhancement or for health reasons. The fear in creating designer babies is that it may herald a new era of “consumer eugenics” with potentially unknown consequences for humankind.

a growing number of scientists are using autonomous robots to interrogate animal behavior and cognition. Researchers have designed robots to behave like ants, cockroaches, rodents, chickens, and more, then deployed their bots in the lab or in the environment to see how similarly they behave to their flesh-and-blood counterparts.

robots give behavioral biologists the freedom to explore the mind of an animal in ways that would not be possible with living subjects, says University of Sheffield researcher James Marshall, who in March helped launch a 3-year collaborative project to build a flying robot controlled by a computer-run simulation of the entire honeybee brain.

Not only did the bots move around the space like the rat pups did, they aggregated in remarkably similar ways to the real animals.3 Then Schank realized that there was a bug in his program. The robots weren’t following his predetermined rules; they were moving randomly.

“I really think there is a lot to be discovered by doing the engineering side along with the science.”

Animal experiments are still needed to advance neuroscience.” But, he adds, robots may prove to be an indispensable new ethological tool for focusing the scope of research. “If you can have good physical models,” Prescott says, “then you can reduce the number of experiments and only do the ones that answer really important questions.”

animal-mimicking robots is not easy, however, particularly when knowledge of the system’s biology is lacking.

However, when the researchers also gave the robots a sense of flow, and programmed them to assume that odors come from upstream, the bots much more closely mimicked real lobster behavior. “That was a demonstration that the animals’ brains were multimodal—that they were using chemical information and flow information,” says Grasso, who has since worked on robotic models of octopus arms and crayfish.

some sense, the use of robotics in animal-behavior research is not that new. Since the inception of the field of ethology, researchers have been using simple physical models of animals—“dummies”—to examine the social behavior of real animals, and biologists began animating their dummies as soon as technology would allow. “The fundamental problem when you’re studying an interaction between two individuals is that it’s a two-way interaction—you’ve got two players whose behaviors are both variable,”

building a robot that animals will accept as one of their own is complicated, to say the least.

handful of other researchers have also successfully integrated robots with live animals—including fish, ducks, and chickens. There are several notable benefits to intermixing robots and animals; first and foremost, control. “One of the problems when studying behavior is that, of course, it’s very difficult to have control of animals, and so it’s hard for us to interpret fully how they interact with each other

that are found on pain-transmitting neurons called nociceptors.

further investigate how the scorpion venom inhibits the transmission of pain, Rowe and her colleagues sequenced the Nav1.8 channel, replaced grasshopper mouse sequences with house mouse sequences, and expressed the mutant channels in a cell line to observe the effects of the genetic changes.

“a really small amount of variation—one amino acid—can actually produce these really profound physiological effects,” Rowe said. “Evolutionarily speaking, it allows this mouse to then feed on a chemically protected scorpion.”

Looking ahead, astronomers found that ISON will pass within a cosmic whisker of the sun, close enough to potentially be ripped apart by the star’s intense gravity.

Unlike previous sungrazing comets, ISON was detected more than a year out, giving researchers at the world's major ground-based telescopes plenty of time to watch its approach to the sun.

. Because sunlight interacts with gas and dust to make comets light up, Meech thinks the best explanation for her team’s data is that ISON’s nucleus contained a buried layer of solid carbon monoxide, a featherweight molecule that rapidly turns to gas when exposed to sunlight.

Because scientists have no data on the comet’s rotation, Knight and Walsh conclude that ISON will probably survive. However, Knight acknowledges that other comets have broken up for no known reason, and he is prepared for surprises.

Earthbound stargazers won’t notice these details, but motivated observers may be able to spot a new object in the predawn sky

Indeed, when the Martu and other desert foragers were forced to leave their lands between the 1950s and 1970s, surveys showed that 10 to 20 native mammal species went extinct and the numbers of 43 others dropped sharply

The research compellingly argues that “small-scale human societies can actually exist in an ecosystem without damaging it over a very long period of time,” says archeologist Bruce Smith of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “It’s just wonderful science.”

“We saw this really dramatic effect,” Kats says. “You have an object that at 90o looks the same as at 50o.”

, it could allow soldiers and military aircraft to evade thermal sensors, Kats and his colleagues think. Such a material could also allow heaters to maintain a constant temperature by emitting less radiation in cold conditions and more in hot conditions.

want to know how vanadium dioxide rearranges its internal structure as it warms to create its unusual interactions with light and electricity.

“It opens the door to some really interesting physics.”

Why does it happen? Some say that by mating with a “passive” male and transferring sperm, that sperm then gets passed over to the female when the passive male mates. Sneaky. But does it really happen?

If it is mistaken identity, as the authors hypothesize, it certainly happens a lot. Why could you get so many cases of false identity

In many observed cases, the males being mated with attempted to fight off the attackers. In others, they may emit pheromones of their own that let the males know that nope, this isn’t what you’re looking for. In some cases, the targeted male just runs away. But it’s hard to tell how often this happens, as no one has ever really studied it.

t very few of the hypotheses have been tested. Most of the insect orders in which male same-sex behavior has been documented have at most one or two studies. And of those, most are not focused on same-sex mating behavior; they just list it as a by-product

So it would be interesting to test these hypotheses, and to figure out what is really driving the guy-on-guy bug action. Is it pheromones? Desperation? Safety in numbers? Or something else? Science in the future will have to tell. 

It shows that the little changes provided by many, many transcriptional enhancers can help make the small tweaks that result in an individual facial shape. Of, course, this study was done in mice, but it’s very possible that these effects are present in humans (though hopefully none of them result in a long furry snout). The results could help scientists better understand what gives one person that chiseled jaw, and another that heavy brow. And the next time you look in the mirror, and see your cleft chin or your prominent cheekbones, send out many small thank yous to your many, many transcriptional enhancers.

Language used throughout the center is artfully neutral, and each specimen is accompanied by only a few basic facts and a brief story highlighting a social issue. One display shows dried leaves from a transgenic American chestnut, engineered with a wheat gene to resist the fungal blight that nearly eradicated wild populations of the tree. An audio guide recounts how researchers decided to use the wheat gene instead of one from frogs, for fear of controversy.

The museum’s approach could frustrate science enthusiasts when social and ethical questions push interesting scientific details into the background.

Growing evidence suggests that gloomy moods improve key types of thinking and behavior, Forgas asserts in a new review paper aptly titled “Don’t worry, be sad!” For good evolutionary reasons, positive and negative moods subtly recruit thinking styles suited to either benign or troubling situations,

Many emotion theorists now agree that negative moods direct attention to tasks at hand and promote analytical thinking, whereas positive moods broaden attention and prompt original thinking. Researchers in a field dubbed “positive psychology” have put a lot of recent focus on exploring how happiness profits mind and body.

Whether good or bad, moods are relatively low-intensity, background feelings that can last for anywhere from a few minutes to the whole day. A person may feel somewhat good or bad, happy or sad, without knowing why or even being aware of such moods.

On “good” days, he reasoned, everything just felt right without any past triumphs coming to mind. On “bad” days, life felt lousy in the moment, without any tragic memories returning for an encore.

Individuals aren’t slaves to their moods, Schwarz cautions. A sad person can think outside the box if necessary, say, to solve problems at work. And a happy person can accurately fill out tax forms or complete other detail-heavy tasks.

Moods provide surprisingly keen insights into one’s environment, the team concluded.

By embracing their moods, superior forecasters gained unconscious access to a vast amount of learned information that informed their predictions, Pham speculated.

Alternatively, good moods trigger a loose mode of thought conducive to creativity and seeing the big picture. Happiness signals that a situation is safe, or at least not immediately threatening,

Sad moods also improve eyewitness memory, apparently by lowering the tendency to incorporate false and misleading details into accounts of what was observed. In a 2005 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, college students witnessed a staged altercation between a lecturer and a woman who angrily interrupted the talk.

Sad moods can also make first impressions of others more reliable,

Sad folks took longer to read and rate the essays than happy and neutral participants did. That’s probably because feeling sad fostered a more careful appraisal of essays and photos, Forgas suggests. As a result, he proposes, sad volunteers largely rejected the stereotype of philosophers as tweedy, professorial men, helping to minimize the halo effect.

In these experiments, moods were induced either by having participants watch happy or sad film clips or by falsely telling volunteers that they had scored extremely well or poorly on a test of spatial abilities.

In both conditions, raters determined that sad volunteers communicated more information relevant to the movie scenes and less unrelated information than the other two groups did, especially the happy folks. Those in a sad mood were especially good at keeping accounts brief, clear and to the point.

Moods were induced after participants watched movie clips but before they described the scenes, ensuring that the clips didn’t sway their manipulated moods.

Sad feelings may influence communication differently in situations where conversation

But moods may not engage specific mental strategies as proposed

If these findings hold up, happy and sad moods simply signal whether or not to change one’s current thinking style, Huntsinger says, rather than indicating whether to adopt an analytical or playful thinking style. Researchers have yet to test which of these two possibilities best explains mood-related behaviors.

much remains unknown about precisely how moods influence thought

working on more broadly applying [the therapy] to other forms of genetic hearing loss,” he said. But in contrast to VGLUT3 mutant mice, which are missing the protein entirely, humans with missense mutations expressed a defective transporter, making it unclear whether Lustig’s strategy could translate to human VGLUT3-linked deafness.

Taste and smell are two of the senses that have received less attention from gene therapy researchers—but that’s changing

The neurons [in VGLUT3 mutant mice] are waiting for the neurotransmitter to activate them”—but no signal comes, and the mice are profoundly deaf,

Treating the mice intra-nasally with gene therapy vectors carrying the wildtype Ift88 gene, researchers saw significant regrowth of nasal cilia, whereas control mice given empty vectors showed no regrowth. Treated mice almost doubled in weight compared to controls.

So far, no scientists have designed a gene therapy to target taste buds, but at least one team is tackling an important factor in taste: saliva. If a person’s saliva production drops below 50 percent of normal, “you get tooth decay and trouble swallowing,”

Scientists are also developing gene therapies for disorders involving touch—or at least pain-sensing—neurons, with one drug candidate

Wolfe envisions that someday pain treatment could be as simple as visiting the doctor every few months for a quick skin prick “wherever it hurts”—choosing between a variety of genes to get the best effect.

The purpose of the surgery was to remove electrodes that had previously been implanted in the patients’ brains to monitor seizures. But before they were taken out, the electrodes enabled the researchers to study the activity of individual neurons in the cortex, in addition to large-scale brain activity from EEG recordings.

importance of communication between discrete groups of neurons, both within the cortex and across brain regions, is analogous to a band playing music, said George Mashour, a neuroscientist and anesthesiologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “You need musical information to come together either in time or space to really make sense,”

“Consciousness and cognitive activity may be similar. If different areas of the brain aren’t in synch or if a critical area that normally integrates cognitive activity isn’t functioning, you could be rendered unconscious.”

, Purdon and colleagues were able to discern a more detailed neural signature of loss of unconsciousness, this time by using EEG alone. Monitoring brain activity in healthy patients for 2 hours as they underwent propofol-induced anesthesia, they observed that as responsiveness fades, high-frequency brain waves (12–35 hertz) rippling across the cortex and the thalamus were replaced by two different brain waves superimposed on top on one another: a low-frequency (<1 hertz) wave and an alpha frequency (8–12 hertz) wave. “These two waves pretty much come at loss of consciousness,”

“We’ve started to teach our anesthesiologists how to read this signature on the EEG”

Anesthesia is not the only state in which consciousness is lost, of course

o measure the gradual breakdown of connectivity between neural networks during natural REM sleep and anesthesia, as well as in brain-injured, unresponsive patients. Using an electromagnetic coil to activate neurons in a small patch of the human cortex, then recording EEG output to track the propagation of those signals to other neuronal groups, the researchers can measure the connectivity between collections of neurons in the cortex and other brain regions.

minimally conscious patients, the magnetically stimulated signals propagated fairly far and wide, occasionally reaching distant cortical areas, much like activations seen in locked-in but conscious patients. In patients in a persistent vegetative state, on the other hand, propagation was severely limited—a breakdown of connectivity similar to that observed in previous tests of anesthetized patients. What’s more, in three vegetative patients that later recovered consciousness, the test picked up signs of increased connectivity before clinical signs of improvement became evident.

“I think understanding consciousness itself is going to help us find successful [measurement] approaches that are universally applicable,” said Pearce.

audited existing maps for 174 infectious diseases of clinical importance. Following a huge systematic review, they scored the maps for each disease according to how much of the known global range is covered and the quality of the data—whether they were up-to-date and whether they relied on accurate measures like molecular diagnostics or GPS coordinates, rather than unverified expert opinion.

even the highest-scoring diseases have room for improvement.

. They argue that technology can help to plug the gaps in our maps in the future, and they point to several untapped sources of data. For example, both PubMed and GenBank, which collect biomedical literature and gene sequences respectively, contain geospatial information for the majority of diseases that the team reviewed. And social networks like Twitter can provide invaluable real-time clues about spreading symptoms and illnesses, often tagged with geographical information. During the 2009 outbreak of H1N1 swine flu, for example, Twitter predicted outbreaks 1 or 2 weeks ahead of traditional surveillance measures.

I struggled because governments or researchers wouldn’t share their information,” he said. “But there was all this incredible knowledge on the web being discussed through professional networks or news media.”

believes that the problem now is not a lack of data but a deluge of it. Sites like HealthMap and BioCaster are already using learning algorithms to filter online sources for information relevant to infections. They are also using crowdsourcing tools that ask online volunteers to check if flagged social media chatter actually relates to the disease of interest.

phenomenon is to look at brain plasticity, or how the brain’s structure and function change over time. Plasticity is hard to study, however, because it mostly takes place at the synaptic level

found that individual differences in exploratory behavior correlated with individual differences in the numbers of new neurons generated. “To out knowledge, it’s the first example of a direct link between individual behavior and individual brain plasticity,” Kempermann said.

could help explain why human identical twins raised in the same family end up with different personalities. “These kinds of processes are notoriously difficult to study in people, because we can’t control human environments experimentally,” said Eric Turkheimer, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, who studies how differences in the personalities of identical twins emerge over time. “That’s why an animal model is so important.”

with an animal model to help address the ways living our lives make us who we are,” said Kempermann. “So we have touched on an approach that allows us start to get the small part of an answer to a very big question.”

first new fossil was unearthed in 2011, when the team found a molar belonging to the oldest known Old World monkey or cercopithecoid, which they named Nsungwepithecus gunnelli. A year later and 15 kilometers away, they found the oldest known remains of a hominoid or “ape”—a jawbone and four teeth belonging to a new species that they dubbed Rukwapithecus fleaglei. 

fossils from the late Oligocene are rare, partly because there are few deposits of the right age and they tend to be covered in thick vegetation.

“That implies that the hominoid-cercopithecoid divergence was well underway.”

the new discoveries expand the range of Oligocene primates from a handful of fossils in Kenya and Saudi Arabia, to the more southerly country of Tanzania. This location also suggests that the ape and Old World monkey lineages arose against a background of great geological upheaval. By the time Rukwapithecus and Nsungwepithecus appeared, the climate was warming and the flat Tanzanian landscape had already begun to fragment into mountains, deep rifts, and lakes, creating the beginnings of the Eastern African Rift. These changes could have created many new habitats, and fueled the diversification of the local primates.

were expecting [similar] fossils to occur in a more tectonically stable landscape, and were searching to the north in Kenya, Libya, and Egypt,”

“The Rukwa Rift Basin Project has succeeded in destroying those preconceived notions and opens many new possibilities.”

We suspect that by 25 million years ago, there were already several independent lineages of both apes and monkeys in Africa, but paleontologists just haven’t found their fossil remains yet. We are soon headed back to the field to try to find some more!”

“These are very difficult tradeoffs that our society has to make,” said Dr. Woodcock. “The reason we approve these drugs is for people in pain. But we can’t ignore the epidemic on the other side.”

In 2011, about 131 million prescriptions for hydrocodone-containing medications were written for some 47 million patients, according to government estimates. That volume of prescriptions amounts to about five billion pills.

Schedule II drugs are those drugs with the highest potential for abuse that can be legally prescribed.

Along with changing how doctors prescribe these drugs, the classification change will also impose added storage and recordkeeping requirements on druggists. In some states, nurse practitioners and other health care professionals who can currently prescribe hydrocodone-containing drugs may no longer be able to do so.

The international team has found more than 4,000 "enhancers" in the mouse genome that appear to play a role in facial appearance.

"In the mouse embryos we can see where exactly, as the face develops, this switch turns on the gene that it controls.

"These mice looked pretty normal, but it is really hard for humans to see differences in the face of mice," explained Prof Visel.

"What this really tells us is that this particular switch also plays a role in development of the skull and can affect what exactly the skull looks like," he explained.

Understanding this could also help to reveal why and how things can go wrong as embryos develop in the womb, leading to facial birth defects.

"And they have severe implications for the kids that are affected. They affect feeding, speech, breathing, they can require extensive surgery and they have psychological implications."

Professor Visel added that scientists were just at the beginning of understanding the processes that shape the face, but their early results suggested it was an extremely complex process.

The system is small: about 1-2% the mass of the Milky Way and is rich in heavier elements.

But it has a surprising feature: it is turning gas and dust into new stars at a remarkable rate, churning them out hundreds of times faster than our own galaxy can.

One very interesting way to learn about the Universe is to study these outliers and that tells us something about what sort of physical processes are dominating galaxy formation and galaxy evolution. "What was great about this galaxy is not only is it so distant, it is also pretty exceptional."

astronomers are likely to discover even more distant galaxies when Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is launched and other ground-based telescopes come online.

This is an important step forward, but we need to continue looking for more.