Does your dog know what you’re thinking? Cognitive biologists have shown our canine companions understand what we mean when we point at something , like a hidden snack. But are dogs really reading our minds? Or have they just lived with us so long that they’ve simply learned to make an association between, say, a hand and a tasty treat? “I still think...
GLOBAL HEALTH Pandemic contributes to big drop in childhood vaccinations In what UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell called a “red alert,” childhood vaccination rates in many countries worldwide have dropped to the lowest level since 2008, in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic. UNICEF and the World Health Organization together...
A massive bill to bolster U.S. innovation took a big step toward becoming law this week after a bipartisan coalition of senators defeated an attempt to strip away most of its research components. The latest version of the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (USICA) also includes new language requiring the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE) to allocate...
The relatively small universe of human genes could grow by up to one-third, if a concerted effort to search for new genes that encode short proteins is successful. Many known miniproteins have already been shown to play key roles in cellular metabolism and disease, so the international effort to catalog new ones and determine their functions, announced last week in Nature...
It’s bad enough that Earth could be losing thousands of species each year. Now two independent studies of birds have concluded the ones most likely to disappear are those that serve unique—and possibly irreplaceable—functions in their ecosystems. Consider the toucan: Its iconic beak lets it eat and disperse seeds and fruit too large for other birds in South American rainforests. Yet...
A neuroscience sleuth challenges data showing one toxic form of amyloid protein is a cause of brain condition
The U.K. government has outlined how it will replace the European Union’s flagship research funding scheme with a domestic program if ongoing Brexit squabbles prevent the country from participating in the EU program. The outline, published on Wednesday, describes how the government’s “Plan B” would give U.K.-based researchers the funding they would have had access...