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The ability to predict when toads come out of hibernation in southern Canada could provide valuable insights into the future effects of climate change on a range of animals and plants.

A national research collaboration funded by the National Institutes of Health has found significant racial and ethnic disparities in breastfeeding outcomes, according to a study published online this week in Pediatrics.

A new study by researchers at Princeton University suggests that sporadic bursts of gene activity may be important features of genetic regulation rather than just occasional mishaps. The researchers found that snippets of DNA called enhancers can boost the frequency of bursts, suggesting that these bursts play a role in gene control.

A new study of fossil fishes from Middle Triassic sediments on the shores of Lake Lugano provides new insights into the recovery of biodiversity following the great mass extinction event at the Permo-Triassic boundary 240 million years ago.

Toronto - As tedious as waiting in a government services line-up can be, that's what most people do, despite having the option of getting their business done online.

In Ontario, only about 10 per cent of vehicle owners do their annual licence plate sticker renewals via the Internet. Maintaining the overhead to serve everyone else in person costs Canada's most populous province nearly $36 million a year.

Why do we feel good about giving to charity when there is no direct benefit to ourselves, and feel bad about cheating the system? Mathematicians may have found an answer to the longstanding puzzle as to why we have evolved to cooperate.

An international team of researchers, publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found that altruism is favoured by random fluctuations in nature, offering an explanation to the mystery as to why this seemingly disadvantageous trait has evolved.

Johns Hopkins University biologists have found that a protein that plays a key role in the lives of stem cells can bolster the growth of damaged muscle tissue, a step that could potentially contribute to treatments for muscle degeneration caused by old age and diseases such as muscular dystrophy.

Disease ecologists working in the Amazonian city of Iquitos, Peru, have quantified for the first time how a fever affects human mobility during the outbreak of a mosquito-borne pathogen. The findings were published by Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

RICHLAND, Wash. -- Materials scientists have created a new material that performs like a cell membrane found in nature. Such a material has long been sought for applications as varied as water purification and drug delivery.

Referred to as a lipid-like peptoid (we'll unpack that in a second), the material can assemble itself into a sheet thinner, but more stable, than a soap bubble, the researchers report July 12 in Nature Communications. The assembled sheet can withstand being submerged in a variety of liquids and can even repair itself after damage.

The results of a study conducted by Dr. Anick Bérard, Professor and Fonds de recherche du Québec - Santé Research Chair on Medications and Pregnancy, at the University of Montreal's Faculty of Pharmacy and the Ste-Justine University Hospital demonstrate that the use of nicotine patches or the drug Zyban has positive effects for the unborn child and allows pregnant women to stop smoking during and after pregnancy.

Worcester, Mass. - Illuminating traditional wisdom with chemistry and biophysics, a research team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has characterized the role of compounds in cranberry juice that block the critical first step in bacterial infections. The results open a potential new area of focus for antibiotic drug development.

DNA doesn't exist in a vacuum: even though every cell contains the entire genome of its host organism, they know how to differentiate, to become part of an eye, or a bone, or a leaf. These differences are related to each cell's transcriptome--the array of messenger RNA (mRNA) that describe which parts of the genome are expressed as they are translated into proteins.

URBANA, Ill. - Atrazine has been very good at killing weeds in corn fields for more than 50 years. But some of the properties that make it a successful herbicide, such as its persistence in the soil and ability to be transported in water, also lead to concerns about potential environmental impact. At both federal and state levels, increasing restrictions on atrazine use has the sweet corn industry wondering about alternatives.

A recent study by researchers at Johns Hopkins concludes that a substantial number of people with a history of the most frequent kind of nonmelanoma skin cancers still get sunburned at the same rate as those without previous history, probably because they are not using sun-protective methods the right way or in the right amounts.

The way that different languages convey information has long fascinated linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists alike. Murrinhpatha, the lingua franca spoken by the majority of Aboriginal people in the Moyle and Fitzmaurice rivers region of Australia's Northern Territory has many interesting features, with the absence of verbal abstract directions a prominent one among them. And if a language doesn't have terms to denote specific space concept, how can speakers communicate the direction of one location with respect to another?