A discovery that may someday help to explain human social behavior and disorders such as autism has been made in a species of pudgy rodents by researchers funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and National Center for Research Resources (NCRR).

Researchers at Yale have identified a gene that regulates the major immune response in plants, programmed cell death (PCD), according to a recent report in the journal Cell.

To protect themselves from viruses, plants create a zone of dead cells around an infection site that prevents the infection from spreading. Savithramma Dinesh-Kumar, associate professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale and his colleagues discovered how the plants keep from killing themselves after they turn on the cell-suicide PCD process.

Standing still when a threat is detected is a defensive, protective reaction. This ancestral and automatic behavior allows the prey to stay unnoticed by a potential predator. A new study published in Psychophysiology finds that humans, like many other complex animals, freeze when encountering a threat. The mere picture of an injured or mutilated human induces this reaction. When viewing these unpleasant images, the study's participants froze as their heart rate decelerated and amount of their body sway reduced. The authors found that this abrupt reaction, so critical for the survival of some animals, has stayed with humans.

A team of engineers from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Colorado at Boulder has removed bioaerosols -- airborne biological particulate matter -- from the air of a hospital therapy pool using a new generation of hybrid filters.

Scientists at the University of York are warning that dramatic changes may soon occur in Africa's vegetation in response to global warming.

They believe the effect may be on a similar scale to the climatic disruption in the last Ice Age and the African forest decline 2,500 years ago.

Leading marine scientists for the first time have assessed dolphin and porpoise populations around the world which are severely threatened by entanglement in fishing gear and recommended nine urgent priorities for action in a report commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund. These nine projects highlight species threatened by bycatch that will most likely benefit from immediate action and will continue to languish without intervention.