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Professor Mark Elgar, an expert in evolutionary biology and animal behaviour from the School of BioSciences, analysed data from elite-level team sports to shine a light on the nature of leadership.

"Conventional wisdom holds that leaders, in business and politics, are picked on the basis of their physical stature, where taller and bigger suggests a better leader," Prof Elgar said.

"I wanted to know if this is true in sport," he added.

Philadelphia, January 20, 2016 - The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) proposes new rules that will require authors to share clinical trial data as a prerequisite for their manuscripts to be considered for publication. The goal is to improve the benefit to society from the efforts of patients who volunteer to participate in clinical trials. The ICMJE proposal is outlined in an editorial published simultaneously today in Annals of Internal Medicine and 13 other ICMJE member journals.

Nature contains a treasure trove of substances that could help fight human disease. Just this year, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine honored the development of drugs that fight parasites and malaria based on such "natural products." But finding these molecules and discovering new chemical identities represents slow and painstaking work. This week in ACS Central Science, researchers report a new way to greatly speed up that process.

Diseased hearts may be thrown out of rhythm by structural differences -- now visible for the first time -- in protein groups that connect heart muscle cells, according to the authors of a study to be published in the journal Nature Communications online Jan. 20.

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- A Mayo Clinic study of people who received anesthesia for surgery after age 40 found no association between the anesthesia and development of mild cognitive impairment later in life. Mild cognitive impairment is a stage between the normal cognitive decline of aging and dementia. The findings are published in the February issue of the medical journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

Depression in both expectant mothers and fathers increases the risk of premature birth, finds a study published in BJOG: an International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (BJOG).

New research from the University of Southampton indicates that the public are being exposed, without their knowledge, to airborne ultrasound.

The study found increasing exposure to ultrasound in locations such as railway stations, museums, libraries, schools and sports stadiums, in which there have been complaints of nausea, dizziness, migraine, fatigue and tinnitus.

Ultrasound in public places can be generated from a number of sources including loudspeakers, door sensors and public address systems.

NAIROBI, KENYA (20 January 2016)--Small, family farmers in Africa purchase more than half of their seeds every year through local markets and other informal sources--neglected outlets that present a major opportunity for improving access to better crop varieties crucial to dealing with climate, nutrition, and other production challenges in a region where food security remains a major concern. That's a key finding from comprehensive new research released today in the Journal Food Security that examined some 10,000 seed transactions across five African countries and Haiti.

In results published on October 19, 2015 in the Journal of Lipid Research, a team of translational scientists at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) report a new reason why non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) worsens in people who are obese.

DURHAM, N.C. -- When the cancer-causing Epstein-Barr virus moves into a B-cell of the human immune system, it tricks the cell into rapidly making more copies of itself, each of which will carry the virus.

To satisfy a sudden increase in demand for more building parts, rapidly dividing host cells will chew up their insides to free up more amino acids, fats and nucleotides.

Tuesday, Jan 19th, 2016, Cleveland: A committee of national experts, led by a Cleveland Clinic researcher, has established first-of-its-kind guidelines to promote more accurate and individualized cancer predictions, guiding more precise treatment and leading to improved patient survival rates and outcomes.

LA JOLLA--(January 19, 2016) Agricultural grafting dates back nearly 3,000 years. By trial and error, people from ancient China to ancient Greece realized that joining a cut branch from one plant onto the stalk of another could improve the quality of crops.

Now, researchers at the Salk Institute and Cambridge University have used this ancient practice, combined with modern genetic research, to show that grafted plants can share epigenetic traits, according to a new paper published the week of January 18, 2016 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers at the University of Hawai'i - Mānoa (UHM) developed an array of highly innovative experiments to allow scientists to safely test first-aid measures used for box jellyfish stings - from folk tales, like urine, to state-of-the-art technologies developed for the military. The power of this new array approach, published this week in the journal Toxins, is in its ability to rigorously assess the effectiveness of various treatments on inhibiting tentacle firing and venom toxicity - two aspects of a sting that affect the severity of a person's reaction.

Hypertension is a major risk factor of various diseases including stroke, heart failure, vascular disease, and kidney disease. Angiotensin II, which is produced by the renin-angiotensin system, primarily functions as a physiological regulator of blood pressure and cardiovascular homeostasis, but it also plays a major role in the pathogenesis of hypertension. In the aorta, angiotensin II promotes hypertrophy of vascular smooth muscle cells through angiotensin type 1 receptor (AT1R), resulting in hypertension by increasing arterial wall thickness and vascular resistance.

For the first time, researchers have been able to directly estimate the Anglo-Saxon ancestry of the British population from ancient skeletons, showing how Anglo-Saxon immigrants mixed with the native population.

Human remains excavated from burial sites near Cambridge provided the material for the first whole-genome sequences of ancient British DNA. Using a new analysis method to compare these ancient genomes with modern-day sequences, researchers have estimated that approximately a third of British ancestors were Anglo-Saxon immigrants.