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Nature is out to kill everything so a newborn animal must learn to walk on its legs as fast as possible to avoid predators. Learning the precise coordination of leg muscles and tendons takes some time and initially baby animals rely heavily on hard-wired spinal cord reflexes. More advanced and precise muscle control lead to the nervous system becoming well adapted to the young animal’s leg muscles and tendons. No more uncontrolled stumbling – the young animal can now keep up with the adults.

Hangry, a portmanteau of hungry and angry, is widely used in everyday language but the phenomenon has not been widely explored by science outside of laboratory environments. You have probably seen it in television commercials, where someone is irritable, complains a lot, or fatigued until they get a candy bar, when they revert back to themselves.A new survey finds it is not just clever marketing. The team recruited 64 adult participants from central Europe, who recorded their levels of hunger and various measures of emotional wellbeing over a 21-day period.

Why do most people eat dessert after dinner but not before? Culture, or the brain? The prevailing belief is that the body often needs protein so only after that is obtained are carbohydrates 'craved', to add to the body’s fat stores. Yet it is not so simple and a new study combines effects to see how the brain's parallel internal states guide behavior.

We all know people who have poor impulse control. They can't open a bag of chips without eating the whole thing, or they lose their temper over something minor and can't calm down. A new study finds it may involve two major circuits in the basal ganglia. 

Eukaryogenesis is the point at which animal and plant cells separate from bacteria. In animal and plant cells, tubulin forms microtubules which are critical to their internal organization, because they support the cell, giving it structure, shape, and internal organization. Because it is so essential to the cell, uncovering the origin of tubulin would be a remarkable step in understanding how the complex cells found in animals and plants diverged from the single cells of bacteria.

A saying in psychology goes that more truth comes out when people are drunk. This is even when it comes to politics, where studies showed that young people who espouse more liberal beliefs get more conservative when they are inebriated. They stop saying what they think they should be saying based on what people want to hear.Along that line, a wealthy person who was raised poor is more likely to see through excuses of poor people than someone born into money, according to a new paper. They are less 'sympathetic' than people who have never had to struggle. 

Some areas on Mars are extremely salty, very cold, and have only a hint of oxygen - just like Earth. Yet even in the permafrost of Lost Hammer Spring in the Nunavut territory of Canada’s High Arctic, researchers have found microbes that have never been identified before. Using genomic and single cell microbiology methods, they examined their metabolisms and found that the microbial communities found living in Canada’s High Arctic can survive by eating and breathing simple inorganic compounds of a kind that have been detected on Mars - methane, sulfide, sulfate, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide. 

Some politicians and cultural activists may claim that humans are propelled by consumerism but a new paper finds that isn't true. And that it is not true is a good thing.If we were all driven by greed, there would be no poverty. Developing nations would embrace science and have plentiful food. But the environmental strain would be tremendous.

In 1347, the Bubonic or Black Plague first entered the Mediterranean via trade ships transporting goods from the territories of the Golden Horde in the Black Sea. The disease tore through Europe, the Middle East and northern Africa, in some cases claiming up to 60 percent of the population. It resurged throughout the next 500 years.

Scientists just published a study of what may prove to be China's most ancient human fossil. The researchers employed microCT, geometric morphometry, and classical morphology techniques to investigate the remains of the maxillary and five teeth from the skull unearthed at the Chinese site of Gongwangling, on the vast plains on the northern slopes of the Quinling Mountains (province of Shaanxi, in central China) and was discovered by the scientist Woo Ju-Kang in 1963.

Though activists try to portray farmers as slathering pesticides and fertilizer on land, anyone who has farmed know it is just the opposite; land is their greatest asset and given price competition they need to control costs and inputs as much as possible.

It's difficult to imagine that a simple dietary intervention could mean less Alzheimer’s disease but that is why observational studies and epidemiology claims are placed into the exploratory pile until science can take a look.A new paper correlates people with a higher  red blood cell (RBC) docosahexaenoic acid (DHA levels as 49% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease vs. those with lower levels, especially for those carrying the ApoE4 gene, which is also a risk factor for Alzheimer's. You know that correlation is not causation so modifying two risk factors with unclear biological meaning may or not be better than doing nothing and hoping for the best.