Author Archives: agnieszka

A computer program has decided that women are better than men at baby talk. Designed by Gerald McRoberts of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and Malcolm Slaney of IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California, the program listens to speech and analyzes … Continue reading →

Sperm cells act like heat-seeking missiles when it comes to locating an unfertilized egg, according to a paper published in the February Nature Medicine. The egg tends to lie in a spot around 2 degrees Celsius warmer than the place … Continue reading →

As if it’s not scary enough that sharks can smell a drop of blood in an Olympic-sized swimming pool, or that they can sense the electric field given off by a hidden prey’s heartbeat; it seems they can also detect … Continue reading →

Six thousand years ago, neolithic Brits might have enjoyed sips of milk with their steaming haunches of meat. Researchers from England’s University of Bristol report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have discovered milk-fat residue … Continue reading →

Forget the shadow, male groundhogs are looking for love when they emerge from their burrows in early February. Stamatis Zervanos, a biologist at Penn State Berks-Lehigh Valley College, studied 32 free-ranging groundhogs over four hibernation seasons. He found that male … Continue reading →

It’s not “Beam me up, Scotty,” just yet, but teleportation has taken another step forward. Scientists from the University of Geneva in Switzerland and the University of Aarhus in Denmark have taken particles of light, destroyed them, and reconstituted them … Continue reading →

In what would at first glance appear to be a completely useless experiment, researchers have created a duck-billed quail and a quail-billed duck. Jill Helms and Richard Schneider of the University of California at San Francisco successfully transplanted neural crest … Continue reading →