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Humans Smell Gender

The human body produces chemical cues that communicate gender to members of the opposite sex, according to researchers who report their findings in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.  Whiffs of the active steroid ingredients (androstadienone in males and estratetraenol in females) influence our perceptions of movement as being either more masculine or more feminine.  The effect, which occurs completely without awareness, depends…

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Mother's Diet Modifies Her Child's DNA

A mother’s diet before conception can permanently affect how her child’s genes function, according to a study published in Nature Communications.  The first such evidence of the effect in humans opens up the possibility that a mother’s diet before pregnancy could permanently affect many aspects of her children’s lifelong health. Researchers from the MRC International Nutrition Group, based at the London…

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A Marmoset Never Forgets

Scientists studying social learning in animals have shown how easy it can be to introduce a new behavior into a group and watch it spread from individual to individual. However, not nearly as many studies are devoted to following up on the establishment of new behaviors to see if those behavioral traditions persist. In a new study,Tina Gunhold, Jorg Massen,…

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Sequencing the Tree of Life

Scientists working to sequence all manner of bacteria, Archaea, plants, and animals and to make these genomes publicly available hope to use the data to inform health, industrial, and environmental issues. Large-scale sequencing consortia have been churning out data at an impressive rate, yet significant gaps remain in the genomic tree of life. And while these groups have largely been…

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