ScienceDaily: Plants & Animals News

Gut bacteria brew all sorts of chemicals, but we don't know what most of them do. A new study suggests that one such compound, previously linked to cancer, may serve as a bizarre weapon in microbial skirmishes.

The asteroid that killed nearly all dinosaurs struck Earth during springtime. An international team of scientists have determined when the meteorite crashed onto the Earth, after analyzing the remains of fishes that died just after the impact.

Researchers have determined that a gene linked to feeling touch may moonlight as an olfactory gene. That's the conclusion drawn from studying a very small, transparent worm that shares many similarities with the human nervous system.

It has long been known that oscillatory neural activity is a key factor for attentional selection in the mammalian brain. Scientists have now investigated how this works. They found that coupling lower frequencies of oscillations with higher ones allows fine-tuning the brain and is thus the basis for higher cognitive functions, such as selective attention.