News by Subject Medicine & Health

Fork-tailed Flycatchers, scientists just discovered, communicate with the sounds made when they flutter their feathers. And by analyzing recordings of the birds in flight, the researchers found that subspecies with different migration patterns have different "dialects" to their feather sounds, possibly helping contribute to them splitting into separate species.

Confuciusornis was a crow-like fossil bird that lived in the Cretaceous ~120 million years ago. It was one of the first birds to evolve a beak (Fig. 1). Early beak evolution remains understudied. Using an imaging technique called Laser-Stimulated Fluorescence, researchers at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) address this by revealing just how different the beak and jaw of Confuciusornis were compared to birds we see today.

New research overturns current scientific thinking on flu infection in pregnancy. The study published in PNAS helps explain why influenza can lead to life-threatening complications during pregnancy. The research also has implications for our understanding of how COVID-19 may be affecting the vascular system.

Opposite-sex friendships can have non-romantic benefits. And not just for people, but for our primate cousins, too. A 35-year study of 542 baboons finds that males that have close female friends have higher rates of survival. Previous studies have assumed that males befriend females to protect their offspring, or to boost their chances of mating later on. But the new study points to an additional benefit: female friends may help them live a longer life.

A new study from the Tai Chimpanzee Project in Ivory Coast and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, shows that orphaned male chimpanzees are less competitive and have fewer offspring of their own than those who continue to live with their mothers. The remaining puzzle is, what is it that their mothers provide that keeps chimpanzees healthy and competitive?