Science News

Here we demonstrate the highest level of sexual brain size dimorphism ever reported in any vertebrate: male three-spined stickleback of two morphs in an Icelandic lake have 23% heavier brains than females. We suggest that this dramatic sexual size dimorphism is generated by the many cognitively demanding challenges that males are faced in this species, such as an elaborate courtship display, the construction of an ornate nest and a male-only parental care system.

Humans produce two flammable gases: hydrogen and methane. Flammable gases accumulate in an enclosed space and can ignite. Astronauts are humans who spend lots of time in enclosed space.

Children's play is actually a form of learning, a way to investigate the causal mechanisms in the world around them. "Exploratory play is a complex phenomenon," write the authors of the new study, "presumably subserving a range of functions other than the generating informative evidence...However, to the extent that children acquire causal knowledge through exploration, the current results begin to bridge the gap between scientific inquiry and child's play." The task for parents and teachers is to present knowledge while preserving a sense of uncertainty.

Today I resigned from the editorial board of a well respected journal in my field – Genomics. No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings.

Researchers have devised a proposal for the first conclusive experimental test of a phenomenon known as 'Bell's nonlocality.' This test is designed to reveal correlations that are stronger than any classical correlations, and do so between high-energy particles that do not consist of ordinary matter and light. These results are relevant to the so-called 'CP violation' principle, which is used to explain the dominance of matter over antimatter.

How researchers share their findings, and the perspective from Beethoven.
Beethoven once wrote "There should be only one repository of art in the world, to which the artist would donate his works in order to take what he would need". We are trying to build such an open repository for scientific research.

Children who went to bed late and got up late were 1.5 times more likely to become obese than those who went to bed early and got up early. Furthermore, late-nighters were almost twice as likely to be physically inactive and 2.9 times more likely to sit in front of the TV and computer or play video games for more hours than guidelines recommend.