Female birds often choose their mates based on fancy feathers. Female mammals, on the other hand, may be more likely to follow their noses to the right mate. That's one conclusion of Cambridge zoologist Tim Clutton-Brock and Harvard researcher Katherine McAuliffe, whose review of evidence for female mate choice is published in the March 2009 issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology.

Historically, most examples of female mate choice and its evolutionary consequences are found in birds. The classic case is the peacock's tail. The ornate tails do nothing to help peacocks survive. Rather, they emerged because peahens prefer to mate with males that have showy plumage.

WASHINGTON – Romance does not have to fizzle out in long-term relationships and progress into a companionship/friendship-type love, a new study has found. Romantic love can last a lifetime and lead to happier, healthier relationships.

"Many believe that romantic love is the same as passionate love," said lead researcher Bianca P. Acevedo, PhD, then at Stony Brook University (currently at University of California, Santa Barbara). "It isn't. Romantic love has the intensity, engagement and sexual chemistry that passionate love has, minus the obsessive component. Passionate or obsessive love includes feelings of uncertainty and anxiety. This kind of love helps drive the shorter relationships but not the longer ones."

BOSTON ––– In a new study of terminally ill cancer patients, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute found that those who draw on religion to cope with their illness are more likely to receive intensive, life-prolonging medical care as death approaches –– treatment that often entails a lower quality of life in patients' final days.

Previous research has shown that more religious patients often prefer aggressive end-of-life (EOL) treatment. The new study –– to be published in the March 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association –– examined whether these patients actually receive such care. The study's findings suggest that physicians tend to comply with religious patients' wishes for more aggressive care.

Preliminary research in healthy men suggests that the narcolepsy drug modafinil, increasingly being used to enhance cognitive abilities, affects the activity of dopamine in the brain in a way that may create the potential for abuse and dependence, according to a study in the March 18 issue of JAMA.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Somewhere out there in the ocean, SpongeBob SquarePants has a teeny-tiny cousin and a humongous uncle.

That's just what one would expect from a new analysis of body sizes across all orders of animal life that was conducted by researchers at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), in Durham, N.C. and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Researchers Craig McClain and Alison Boyer created a giant database on body sizes across all orders of animal life and found that phyla -- families of animals grouped together by a similar body plan -- with the greatest diversity of species were also those with the largest range of body sizes.

By combining the results of a number of powerful techniques for studying material structure at the nanoscale, a team of researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), working with colleagues in other federal labs and abroad, believe they have settled a long-standing debate over the source of the unique electronic properties of a material with potentially great importance for wireless communications.

The new study* of silver niobate not only opens the door to engineering improved electronic components for smaller, higher performance wireless devices, but also serves as an example of understanding how subtle nanoscale features of a material can give rise to major changes in its physical properties.