Feeding birds display similar habits to human consumers shopping for food, according to research published in the current edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

A two-year study has discovered it is possible to influence hummingbirds’ choice of food by changing the options available to them, in the same way supermarkets can manipulate customers’ preferences by clever positioning of products.

The study is published in the current edition of Proceedings of the Royal Society

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have designed a new way to make vaccines against drugs of abuse that could become a valuable tool for treating addiction by helping the body clear the drug from the bloodstream.

The latest vaccine they created using this approach induces the body to clear nicotine.

“These new vaccines greatly suppress the reinforcing aspects of the drug,” says principal investigator Kim D. Janda, Ph.D. “Blocking it before it gets to the brain–th

U-M study finds no relationship between backpack use, pain

Backpacks have gotten a bad rap. For years, specialists have urged school children to lighten their loads, wear their backpacks on both shoulders and avoid lugging around those heavy school bags whenever possible.

But new research from a University of Michigan Health System physiatrist indicates backpacks don’t cause the stress and strain on young backs that they’ve been linked to.

“There is no go

A new antibiotic appears effective against deadly strains of tuberculosis resistant to nearly all currently available treatments for the infectious disease. The antibiotic, called linezolid, recently saved the lives of four women and one girl who were gravely ill with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and who were hospitalized at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, according to a report by physicians at NYU School of Medicine. The patients, ranging in age from 10 to 54, were resistant to at least eigh

A team of researchers, led by NASA and Columbia University scientists, found airborne, microscopic, black- carbon (soot) particles are even more plentiful around the world, and contribute more to climate change, than was previously assumed by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC).

The researchers concluded if these soot particles are not reduced, at least as rapidly as light-colored pollutants, the world could warm more quickly.

The findings appear in the latest issu

Using a laser range-finder, neurobiologists have scanned real-life scenes to gather millions of distance measurements to surfaces in each scene — analyzing the mass of data to explain a series of long-known but little-understood quirks in how people judge distances.

The measurements reveal, for example, that the tendency of people to estimate the distance of isolated objects as being six to 12 feet away arises because that is the average distance of actual objects and surfaces in the visual