Life Sciences and Chemistry

Feather pecking is a common and serious behavioural disorder in laying hens around the world. The chickens peck and pull the feathers of their victims, and this may lead to cannibalism. Now a group of researchers under the lead of Per Jensen, Professor of ethology at Linköping University have shown that the risk of becoming a victim is largely determined by one single gene, which controls the expression of black pigment in the carrier. A mutation which gives white feathers protects against the att

A new investigation into extinctions caused by climate change has revealed that the giant deer, previously thought to have been wiped out by a cold spell 10,500 years ago, instead survived well into the modern era.

University College London (UCL) scientists scoured the continent to collect dozens of ancient bones and teeth which, when radiocarbon dated, revealed that the Eurasian giant deer survived to 7,000 years ago, much later than previously thought.

Giant deer first

Understanding how microbes in the gut interact with the body could lead scientists and doctors to new a understanding and novel treatments for diseases say scientists from Imperial College London and Astra Zeneca.

In a review published today in Nature Biotechnology, researchers describe how microbes in the gut form the second largest metabolic ‘organ’ in the body and play a key role in disease processes alongside genetic and environmental factors. Microbes in the gut can weigh up to

Social cooperation is one of the most difficult adaptations for evolutionary biologists to explain because competition for resources inside the collective should lead to evolved traits that allow individuals to “cheat” the collective, win more resources and reproduce faster than their more cooperative neighbors — thus undermining the social collective. In new research, evolutionary biologists and geneticists at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have isolated a genetic mechanism

University of Illinois researchers report that four consecutive days of moderate exercise in mice after they were infected with influenza protects them from dying, compared with mice that didn’t exercise. This protective effect was more evident in mice greater than 16 weeks of age, an age at which they are immunologically more mature. The takeaway message: exercise regularly because you never know when you’ll be exposed!

Jeffrey A. Woods, PhD., and graduate student Tom Lowder at the

Call To Rename Class Of Muscle-Derived IL-6 As “Myokines”

For the most of the past century, researchers have searched for a muscle-contraction-induced factor, which mediates some of the exercise effects in other tissues and organs such as the liver and adipose tissue. In their quest for this magic trigger, or class of effectors, it’s been referred to as the “work stimulus,” “work factor” or the “exercise factor.”

Bente Karlund Pedersen, professor of internal medicine at R