For the first time, scientists at King’s College London have identified a gene linking the thickness of the grey matter in the brain to intelligence. The study is published today in Molecular Psychiatry and may help scientists understand biological mechanisms behind some forms of intellectual impairment. The researchers looked at the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer of the human brain.…
Although infants use their memories to learn new information, few adults can remember events in their lives that happened prior to the age of three. Psychologists at Emory University have now documented that age seven is when these earliest memories tend to fade into oblivion, a phenomenon known as “childhood amnesia.” The journal Memory published the research, which involved interviewing…
“Where do new genes come from?” is a long-standing question in genetics and evolutionary biology. A new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, published Jan. 23 in Science Express, shows that new genes are created from non-coding DNA more rapidly than expected. “This shows very clearly that genes are being born from ancestral sequences all the time,”…
Communication requires a sender, a receiver, and a message. But communication doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Often, there are unintended receivers listening in and unintentional messages getting across. Illustrating just how complicated sending a message can be is the example of the túngara frog (Physalaemus pustulosus). Male túngara frogs, native to Central and South America, gather at night in…
They went boating alone without life vests and gave no thought to shimmying up very tall coconut trees. And although they were only figments of a writer’s imagination, the fictional adventurers helped provide new insight into how humans, especially men, gauge the threat of a potential adversary. Those reading the stories — dozens of residents of a small village on…
A new study has found that species living together are not forced to evolve differently to avoid competing with each other, challenging a theory that has held since Darwin’s Origin of Species. By focusing on ovenbirds, one of the most diverse bird families in the world, the Oxford University-led team conducted the most in-depth analysis yet of the processes causing…