news 2013

A 20-year puzzle as to how the heart regulates contraction appears to have been solved by researchers from the University of Bristol. The findings, published in the journal Biophysics, paves the way to improving our understanding of what goes wrong when the heart fails. When the heart beats (contracts), the contractile machinery is switched on by an increase in calcium within the cell.

Our results emphasise the importance of a more general evolutionary view of cognition Fish have the ability to communicate with each other while hunting their prey in ways that were previously known only for humans, great apes, and ravens, according to new research. A study led by Alexander Vail, a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology, found that groupers and coral trout perform a pointing signal to indicate the location of hidden prey to cooperative hunting partners including moray eels, octopuses and Napoleon wrasses.

A model of the spread of gossip on Twitter prior to the Higgs boson discovery announcement has been developed by University of Birmingham computer scientists, according to research published on the online repository, ArXiv. For the first time scientists have been able to analyse the dynamics of social media on a global scale before, during and after the announcement of a major scientific discovery.