Looking at fossils of long-dead creatures, it's easy to understand how anthropologists determine the way an animal looked. But how do they determine how one moved?

Alan Walker,Professor of Anthropology and Biology at Penn State University, and a team of researchers studied 91 separate primate species, including all taxonomic families. The study also included 119 additional species, most of which are mammals ranging in size from mouse to elephant, that habitually move in diverse ways in varied environments.

Their goal was to document the relationship of the dimensions of the semicircular canals to locomotion. These structures are filled with a fluid, which moves within the canals when the animal moves.

A gene responsible for the single most common cause of hearing loss among white adults, otosclerosis, has been identified for the first time. Ms Melissa Thys, from the Department of Medical Genetics, University of Antwerp, Belgium, said that this finding may be a step towards new treatments for otosclerosis, which affects approximately 1 in 250 people.

Otosclerosis is a multifactorial disease, caused by an interaction of genetic and environmental factors. The outcome is a progressive hearing loss as the growing bone in the middle ear interrupts the sound waves passing to the inner ear. While the causative factors remain unknown, now one of the genetic components has been identified, Ms Thys told the conference.

The long-running controversy about the origins of the Etruscan people appears to be very close to being settled once and for all.

Professor Alberto Piazza, from the University of Turin, Italy, will say that there is overwhelming evidence that the Etruscans, whose brilliant civilisation flourished 3000 years ago in what is now Tuscany, were settlers from old Anatolia (now in southern Turkey).

Etruscan culture was very advanced and quite different from other known Italian cultures that flourished at the same time, and highly influential in the development of Roman civilisation. Its origins have been debated by archaeologists, historians and linguists since time immemorial.

Climate models are reliable tools that help researchers better understand the observed record of ocean warming and variability.

That's the finding of a group of Livermore scientists, who in collaboration with colleagues at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, had earlier established that climate models can replicate the ocean warming observed during the latter half of the 20th century, and that most of this recent warming is caused by human activities.

The observational record also shows substantial variability in ocean heat content on interannual-to-decadal time scales. The new research by Livermore scientists demonstrates that climate models represent this variability much more realistically than previously believed.

Many of the areas of the human genome previously thought to be deserts are in fact teeming with life.

Most known human genes in the genome map are still incompletely annotated, says Professor Alexandre Reymond, from the Centre for Integrative Genomics, University of Lausanne, Switzerland and the Department of Genetic Medicine, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.

“We found that the vast majority of the protein coding genes we studied utilised often in a tissue-specific manner previously unknown set of exons [the regions of DNA within a gene that are transcribed to messenger RNA] outside the current boundaries of the annotated genes ”, according to Professor Reymond.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Akron have created synthetic “gecko tape” with four times the sticking power of the real thing.

The researchers describe a process for making polymer surfaces covered with carbon nanotube hairs. The nanotubes imitate the thousands of microscopic hairs on a gecko’s footpad, which form weak bonds with whatever surface the creature touches, allowing it to “unstick” itself simply by shifting its foot.

For the first time, the team has developed a prototype flexible patch that can stick and unstick repeatedly with properties better than the natural gecko foot. They fashioned their material into an adhesive tape that can be used on a wide variety of surfaces, including Teflon.