Podcast out now! Ximena Cibils chats to us about her research paper, Silicon and Epichloë-endophyte defences in a model temperate grass diminish feeding efficiency and immunity of an insect, which has…
Category: Life
Canine Cognition: Dogs Match Words with Objects
Summary: A new study reveals dogs’ ability to understand words as representations of objects, indicating a deeper level of cognitive processing than previously thought. Researchers used non-invasive EEG to measure…
Fear Distorts Reward Decisions Differently for Women and Men
Summary: Fear can significantly influence women’s preference for immediate financial rewards over larger, delayed ones, a decision-making bias known as “delay discounting,” while men’s choices remain unaffected by their emotional…
Plants and flammability—Deep inside the mechanisms of wild fires – Functional Ecologists
In this revisited blog post, Indra Boving, a PhD candidate at University of California-Santa Barbara, USA, shares her work ‘Live fuel moisture and water potential exhibit differing relationships with leaf-level…
Astrocytes Remember: A New Layer of Immune Memory Uncovered
Summary: Astrocytes, traditionally non-immune cells within the central nervous system, possess the ability to develop an immune memory, responding more vigorously to subsequent immune challenges. This groundbreaking study reveals that…
AI Matches Humans in Vocal Emotion Detection
Summary: Machine learning (ML) models can accurately identify emotions from brief audio clips, achieving a level of accuracy comparable to humans. By analyzing nonsensical sentences to remove the influence of…
American bullfrogs may be threatening a rare frog species in Brazil
American bullfrog DNA has turned up not far from the only known habitat of Pithecopus rusticus — a small, critically endangered tree frog that lives in Brazil. Bullfrogs are native…
Why does temperature determine sex in long-lived reptiles? – Functional Ecologists
In this blog post, Samantha Bock, a post-doctoral researcher, discusses her study “Differential early-life survival underlies the adaptive significance of temperature-dependent sex determination in a long-lived reptile“, which has been…
