New Royal Society journal studies
...he extent to which winner and loser effects impact hierarchy formation. We examined the impact of winner and loser effects on hierarchy formation in the green swordtail, Xiphophorus helleri. Our results demonstrate that randomly chosen ...The blotchier the face, the better the wasp
...hat in such nests, the wasps establish a dominance hierarchy by fighting. The winner, the top or alpha wasp, ge...as established and then fighting continued and the hierarchy flipped something that never happened in wasp fights with unaltered wasps. Even if the dominance hi......ted sightings. Even then, he says, there's a clear hierarchy for bird innovation ability. The crow and falcon families are at the top of the class, followed by hawks, woodpeckers and herons. In 2002, the feeding innovation index methodology gained a higher scientific perch when it was successfully extended to ...Short-term social stress may benefit immune response to infection
...The mice lived in a colony with a well established hierarchy of mice, so having a higher-ranked, more aggressive mouse placed in their cage for two hours was definitely disruptive and upsetting. This stressful episode was repeated on six consecutive days, after which both stressed and non-stressed mice were gi...Hawaiian soils reveal clues to cultural history
...ests and rulers," said Chadwick. "The basis of the hierarchy of groups or classes is the ability to produce a surplus of basic foodstuffs." However, it isn't clear whether the warrior class drove peasants to produce in agriculturally marginal areas, or if the class system developed out of surplus agriculture...Genome of social amoeba shows its importance as research model
...ed the place this unusual organism occupies in the hierarchy of existence. "It is more closely related to fungi and animals than we had previously thought," he said. Dictyostelium is used as a model organism for studying cell polarity, how amoeba move and the differentiation of tissues. It usually exists as a ...Biologists determine genetic blueprint of social amoeba
...ified the place that Dictyostelium occupies in the hierarchy of life. "It is more closely related to fungi and animals than we had previously thought," says Adam Kuspa, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and a senior author of the Nature paper. The disc...Rice, Iowa state biologists search for 'half-fusion'
... membranes are not impervious. Cells use a complex hierarchy of proteins that work in concert to allow cell membranes to fuse with other cells or with membrane-encased packages of proteins and other chemicals that the cell needs to take in or release. Though well-studied, the molecular details of membrane fus...Scientists journey to southern Africa to unravel the secret world of elephant communication
...acoustic and seismic estrus calls on the dominance hierarchy among bulls. "Our work is really at the interface of geophysics, neurophysiology and ecology," she says. "We're asking questions that no one has really dealt with before." SIDEBAR: Anatomy of the trunk and feet offers new clues to elephant seismic ...Good connections are everything
...l networks. Indeed, the biosphere contains a whole hierarchy of scale-free networks which typically exhibit a decay exponent in the range larger than 2 but smaller than 2.5. Additional examples are provided by the metabolic networks within biological cells which have been studied for 43 different organisms rep...'Cookbook recipes' would cure disease with nontoxic DNA delivery systems
...lipids instead of cationic lipids "creates a whole hierarchy of interactions and a much richer range of structures," Wong said, "which really opens up new possibilities."...JCI table of contents September 1, 2005
...by angiotensin II in vivo and determination of the hierarchy of responses are vital to the understanding of the mechanism of vascular disease and to the development of therapies targeted at inhibiting the common transcription effectors of vascular physiology." TITLE : Ets-1 is a critical regulator of Angioten...Marine snail's neural network sheds light on the basis for flexible behavior
...r network. Most motor systems are organized into a hierarchy of at least two layers of neurons, with higher-order neurons acting on lower-order neurons, which form a small number of building blocks or modules that produce a variety of behaviors. However, it was not clear how variants of a single motor act are ...Rapid genomic and physiological responses for social dominance
...te and dominant males whose position in the social hierarchy had not been experimentally manipulated were similarly examined. At the moment of development of the bright coloration and behavior associated with dominant males, the expression of the immediate-early gene egr-1 increased in the brain region that l......ormal/6040.html .) "In the literature, there's a hierarchy of different definitions for what qualifies as a song, but there are usually two main properties," says lead author Timothy E. Holy, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy. "One is that there should be some syllabic diversity--recogni...... found that, "early areas in the visual processing hierarchy respond the same whether or not objects are visible to us or invisible in the context of visual masking." That is, some parts of the brain respond to visual stimuli regardless of whether the conscious mind "sees" them or not. However, Tse and his te...Losing sleep undoes the rejuvenating effects new learning has on the brain
...se findings is that sleep restriction disrupts the hierarchy of cognitive processes. That is, spatial learning seemed to be the primary cognitive strategy, and only when it was disrupted by lack of sleep, did a secondary strategy emerge. "It would be interesting to expand our findings to see if other competing...'Uniquely human' component of language found in gregarious birds
...ed a mathematically rigorous set of definitions, a hierarchy of syntactical complexity, that governs the process of how humans create and understand utterances," said Daniel Margoliash, professor of anatomy and organismal biology at the University of Chicago and co-author of the study. "These rules govern how ......ged the position of individual wasps in the social hierarchy by removing higher ranked, older wasps, thus promoting their younger relatives. Regardless of age, a wasp's contribution to feeding the queen's young depended only on its position in the queue to inherit queenship. Lower-ranked helpers, and helpers ...Researchers appeal for new regulations to save coral reefs from live fish trade
...ortant part of the food chain means the coral reef hierarchy is in turmoil. The coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish is likely to thrive in these situations, particularly when the corals are already stressed by a multitude of other impacts including global warming. According to the 2004 Status of the Coral ...