Losing a limb can be a traumatic experience and, in some cases, emotional and physical pain can linger for years. To better understand the phenomenon, dubbed “phantom limb syndrome,” Université de Montréal graduate student Emma Duerden is inviting amputees to come forward and share their experiences for a major study.

Follow that fish -- threespine sticklebacks that were used in the experiments. For animals that live in social groups, and that includes humans, blindly following a leader could place them in danger.

O. tormota lives in a noisy environment on the brushy edge of streams in the Huangshan Hot Springs, in central China, where waterfalls and rushing water provide a constant din. Most female frogs don’t call; most lack or have only rudimentary vocal cords. A typical female selects a mate from a chorus of males and then –silently – signals her beau. But the female concave-eared torrent frog, Odorrana tormota, has a more direct method of declaring her interest: She emits a high-pitched chirp that to the human ear sounds like that of a bird.

Scientists at the University of Amsterdam have discovered how to keep one’s tomatoes from wilting – the answer lies at the molecular level. The story of how the plant beat the pathogen, and what it means for combating other plant diseases, is published May 9th in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens.

Investigations continue into the cause of a mysterious illness that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of bats since March 2008. At more than 25 caves and mines in the northeastern U.S, bats exhibiting a condition now referred to as “white-nosed syndrome” have been dying.

Since ancient times, locust plagues have been viewed as one of the most spectacular events in nature. In seemingly spontaneous fashion, as many as 10 billion critters can suddenly swarm the air and carpet the ground, blazing destructive paths that bring starvation and economic ruin.

One of the major scientific questions about the brain is how it can translate the simple intent to perform an action—say, reach for a glass—into the dynamic, coordinated symphony of muscle movements required for that action. The neural instructions for such actions originate in the brain’s primary motor cortex, and the puzzle has been whether the neurons in this region encode the details of individual muscle activities or the high-level commands that govern kinetics—the direction and velocity of desired movements.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital investigators have found that an electrically powered amplification mechanism in the cochlea of the ear is critical to the acute hearing of humans and other mammals. The findings will enable better understanding of how hearing loss can result from malfunction of this amplification machinery due to genetic mutation or overdose of drugs such as aspirin.

Male seagulls may be more vulnerable to their environment during embryonic development than females, according to Maria Bogdanova and Ruedi Nager from the University of Glasgow in the UK. Until now, the sex differences in developmental rate and susceptibility to unfavorable conditions during the embryonic stage in birds have received little attention. The paper (1) has just been published in Springer’s journal, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

With nearly one-third of amphibian species threatened with extinction worldwide, fueled in part by the widespread emergence of the deadly chytrid fungus, effective conservation efforts could not be more urgent. In a new article in the open-access journal PLoS Biology, Franco Andreone and his colleagues argue that one of the best places to focus these efforts is Madagascar, a global hotspot of amphibian diversity that shows no signs of amphibian declines—or traces of the chytrid fungus.

Scientists in Germany have discovered a new mechanism of infection for the most fatal bee disease. American Foulbrood (AFB) is the only infectious disease which can kill entire colonies of bees. Every year, this notifiable disease is causing considerable economic loss to beekeepers all over the world. The only control measure is to destroy the infected hive.

The greater dwarf cloud rat (Carpomys melanurus) was rediscovered in April 2008 -- 112 years after the first and only time it had ever been seen by scientists. Cloud rats are one of the most spectacular cases of adaptive radiation by mammals anywhere in the world, with at least 15 species ranging in size from 2.6 kg to 15 grams, all living only in the Philippines. A team of Filipino and American scientists have rediscovered a highly distinctive mammal ¨C a greater dwarf cloud rat ¨C that was last seen 112 years ago. Furthermore, it has never before been discovered in its natural habitat and was thought by some to be extinct.

Young songbirds babble before they can mimic an adult’s song, much like their human counterparts. Now, in work that offers insights into how birds—and perhaps people—learn new behaviors, MIT scientists have found that immature and adult birdsongs are driven by two separate brain pathways, rather than one pathway that slowly matures.

Male seahorses are nature’s real-life Mr. Moms – they take fathering to a whole new level: Pregnancy.

A report publishing online on May 1st in the journal Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press, provides the first evidence of an animal using ultraviolet B (UVB) rays to communicate with other members of its species.

To spotlight the widespread importance of evolution, a group of renowned international scientists have launched a scientific journal devoted to using evolutionary biology to tackle the world's major biological crises. The new journal, titled Evolutionary Applications publishes articles that use evolution to address pressing issues such as climate change, endangered species, food safety, infectious diseases, and invasive species.

The latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary boasts 22,000 pages of definitions. While that may seem far from succinct, new research suggests the reference manual is meticulously organized to be as concise as possible — a format that mirrors the way our brains make sense of and categorize the countless words in our vast vocabulary.

Research by Yale scientists shows that males and females have essentially unisex brains — at least in flies — according to a recent report in Cell designed to identify factors that are responsible for sex differences in behavior.

Annemarie Surlykke from the Institute of Biology, SDU, Denmark, and her colleague, Elisabeth Kalko, from the University of Ulm, Germany, studied the echolocation behavior in 11 species of insect-eating tropical bats from Panamá, the findings of which are reported in this weeks’ PLoS ONE.

A bison and calf in Yellowstone National Park. Bison can repopulate large areas from Alaska to Mexico over the next 100 years provided a series of conservation and restoration measures are taken, according to continental assessment of this iconic species by the Wildlife Conservation Society and other groups. The assessment was authored by a diverse group of conservationists, scientists, ranchers, and Native Americans/First Nations peoples, and appears in the April issue of the journal Conservation Biology.

Researchers discovered a legless lizard and a tiny woodpecker along with 12 other suspected new species in Brazil’s Cerrado, one of the world’s 34 biodiversity conservation hotspots.

In this depiction of the food web of the Burgess Shale from the Middle Cambrian, spheres represent species or groups of species, and the links between them show feeding relationships. The drawing shows a top predator, Anomalocaris, chasing one of its likely prey species, the trilobite Olenoides, with arrows indicating their positions in the food web. Many aspects of the structure of this ancient ecological network are similar to the architecture of modern food webs.

Credit: Image: N. D. Martinez. Food web produced with Network3D software written by R. J. Williams It was an Anomalocaris-eat-trilobite world, filled with species like nothing on today's Earth. But the ecology of Cambrian communities was remarkably modern, say researchers behind the first study to reconstruct detailed food webs for ancient ecosystems. Their paper, published this week in the open-access journal PLoS Biology, suggests that networks of feeding relationships among marine species that lived hundreds of millions of years ago are remarkably similar to those of today.

A handful of soil is a lot like a banana, strawberry and apple smoothie: Blended all together, it is hard to tell what's in there, especially if you have never tasted the fruits before.

Two genes that help insulin regulate mosquitoes’ growth have been identified as key contributors to how the insects enter a dormant state to survive winter’s cold.

Cotton fields in Parker Valley, Ariz. Biologists call for making available more detailed maps of the locations of biotech crops.

Putting more meat on the theory that dinosaurs’ closest living relatives are modern-day birds, molecular analysis of a shred of 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex protein – along with that of 21 modern species – confirms that dinosaurs share common ancestry with chickens, ostriches, and to a lesser extent, alligators.

Dutch ecologist Roxina Soler and her colleagues have discovered that subterranean and aboveground herbivorous insects can communicate with each other by using plants as telephones. Subterranean insects issue chemical warning signals via the leaves of the plant. This way, aboveground insects are alerted that the plant is already ‘occupied’.

Brain activity was much higher in key brain centers when participants viewed a superior player in an unstable social hierarchy -- when participants had the possibility of upward mobility. Human imaging studies have for the first time identified brain circuitry associated with social status, according to researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) of the National Institutes of Health. They found that different brain areas are activated when a person moves up or down in a pecking order – or simply views perceived social superiors or inferiors. Circuitry activated by important events responded to a potential change in hierarchical status as much as it did to winning money.

Our ability to remember the objects, places and people within our environment is essential for everyday life, although the importance of this is only fully appreciated when recognition memory beings to fail, as in Alzheimer’s disease.

While waiting for colleagues at a small natural history museum in the state of Chiapas, Mexico last year, Cornell paleontologist Greg Dietl chanced upon a discovery that has helped rewrite the evolutionary history of crabs and the shelled mollusks upon which they preyed.