Culture

STANFORD, Calif. — The nervous system and the immune system havesomething in common. Each has evolved to react quickly to environmentalcues. Because the nervous system is able to detect some of these cues -say, a characteristic odor signaling a pathogen's presence - at adistance, it sometimes can sense trouble earlier than the immune system,which has to wait until the pathogen invades the organism.

So it makes sense that the two systems might talk to one another.Stanford University School of Medicine geneticists have shown that,indeed, they do.

The 1930s semi is an icon of its age. Three million were built and they are still a major part of our current housing stock. Now a three year research project is about to start at The University of Nottingham that will help people living in these properties meet the Government's ambitions to reduce CO2 emissions from homes.

This joint project with the energy firm E.ON aims to learn energy efficiency lessons for the future from the failings of houses in the past.

Clubbers—people who dance the night away in dance clubs—are seeking communal, ecstatic experiences. And, according to a new study in theJournal of Consumer Research, modern clubbers get a more controlled, legalized version of the raves of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Authors Christina Goulding (University of Wolverhampton), Avi Shankar, Richard Elliott (both University of Bath), and Robin Canniford (University of Exeter) immersed themselves in club culture for five years, interviewing clubbers and researching the history of raves and clubs.

People who gamble from the comfort of their home tend to think they're more in control of their gambling than people who gamble in casinos, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Authors June Cotte (University of Western Ontario) and Kathryn A. Latour (University of Nevada-Las Vegas) found surprisingly little previous research on their subject: the habits and motivations of online gamblers, who contribute to a $10 billion a year industry.

Plans to introduce plant-eating predators to fight a superweed spreading throughout Britain should not be seen as a 'magic bullet', says a world expert on Japanese knotweed at the University of Leicester.

Dr John Bailey of the Department of Biology has been researching the invasive weed since the 1980s. The research continues with PhD students Michelle Hollingsworth and Catherine Pashley. Research in the Leicester department established that the weed in Britain was a single clone- making it one of the biggest female organism in the world.

More than 40 million years ago, primates preferred Texas to northern climates that were significantly cooling, according to new fossil evidence discovered by Chris Kirk, physical anthropologist at The University of Texas at Austin.

Kirk and Blythe Williams from Duke University have discovered Diablomomys dalquesti, a new genus and species of primate that dates to 44-43 million years ago when tropical forests and active volcanoes covered west Texas.

Night-traveling migratory moths may hitch a ride on the wind, but a new study in the October 14th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, confirms that they are anything but drifters.