Culture

In a night sky filled with hungry bats, good-tasting moths increase their chances of survival by mimicking the sounds of their bad-tasting cousins, according to a new Wake Forest University study.

The study is the first to definitively show how an animal species uses acoustic mimicry as a defensive strategy. The research was conducted by Jesse Barber, a doctoral student in biology at Wake Forest. William E. Conner, professor of biology at Wake Forest, co-authored the study.

A fascinating new paper from the June issue of Current Anthropology explores ancient multiple graves and raises the possibility that hunter gatherers in what is now Europe may have practiced ritual human sacrifice.

This practice – well-known in large, stratified societies – supports data emerging from different lines of research that the level of social complexity reached in the distant past by groups of hunter gatherers was well beyond that of many more recent small bands of modern foragers.

McDonald's new advertising campaign to promote high-level career opportunities within the company is a great way to fight the connotation of dead-end drudgery and low wages that comes with "McJobs," according to Jerry M. Newman, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the University at Buffalo School of Management.

Having worked undercover at seven fast-food restaurants across the United States, including McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's, Newman, author of "My Secret Life on the McJob," says that McDonald's has the right idea in its newest television commercial.

Certain army ants in the rainforests of Central and South America conduct spectacular predatory raids containing up to 200,000 foraging ants. Remarkably, some ants use their bodies to plug potholes in the trail leading back to the nest, making a flatter surface so that prey can be delivered to the developing young at maximum speed.Specialization by a minority can help the greater good. Photo by Scott Powell

When the movie Spider-Man 3 swung into theaters a few weeks ago, it found University physics professor James Kakalios waiting. A diehard fan of superhero comics, he takes a double interest in Spidey foe Sandman, who can transform all or part of his body into living sand.

An extraordinary underwater trackway with 12 consecutive prints provides the most compelling evidence to-date that some dinosaurs were swimmers. The 15-meter-long trackway, located in La Virgen del Campo track site in Spain's Cameros Basin, contains the first long and continuous record of swimming by a non-avian therapod dinosaur.

Researchers have found that bricks made from fly ash--fine ash particles captured as waste by coal-fired power plants--may be even safer than predicted. Instead of leaching minute amounts of mercury as some researchers had predicted, the bricks apparently do the reverse, pulling minute amounts of the toxic metal out of ambient air.