News by Subject Biology

'When it comes to predicting the performance of Czech MMA fighters, you shouldn't judge a book by its cover,' says Dr Vit Trebicky, lead author of a new study published in Frontiers in Psychology.

Visualizing your significant other may be just as effective as having them in the room with you when it comes to managing the body's cardiovascular response to stressful situations, according to a University of Arizona study.

So-called bifacial stem cells are responsible for one of the most critical growth processes on Earth -- the formation of wood. By alternately developing into wood and bast cells, these stem cells are thus starting points for forming wood as well as generating plant bast fibres. A team of researchers under the direction of Dr Thomas Greb, a Heisenberg Professor at Heidelberg University, were recently able to demonstrate this phenomenon using new experimental tools.

New research published in The Journal of Physiology indicates shift work exposure in mothers can result in reduced fetal growth and longer pregnancies, even when the shift work is only carried out early in pregnancy.

Heart disease is the greatest killer in the world today. A new study in sheep, publishing Jan. 22 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, by a team from Cambridge University, finds that offspring whose mothers had a complicated pregnancy may be at greater risk of heart disease in later life, suggesting that our cards may be marked even before we are born.

What happens to sex pheromones as new species emerge? New research publishing Jan. 22 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology studies sex pheromones in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, revealing an 'asymmetric' pheromone recognition system in which one pheromone operates extremely stringently whereas the other pheromone is free to undergo a certain degree of diversification, perhaps leading to a first step towards speciation.

Researchers reveal an unexpected connection between the lateral hypothalamus and the hippocampus, the respective feeding and the memory centers of the brain.