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Together with an international team of researchers, Freie Universität Berlin bioarchaeologist Sarah Defant is shedding light on how rural communities in northern Italy developed following the fall of the Roman Empire How did political shifts in power and migration influence how rural communities developed after the fall of the Roman Empire?

A new study on songbirds sheds light on the power of social interaction to facilitate learning, insights that potentially apply to human development. McGill researchers discovered that zebra finches deprived of early social experiences could still form strong bonds with a partner later in life. Once placed into cohabitation with a male, females that had never heard a mating song before could quickly develop a preference for his melody.

One of the most effective means of investigating and understanding autism is eye tracking. Participants are shown photos or videos, and computer software records where their gaze rests. Autistic individuals are more likely to focus on nonsocial aspects of an image, such as objects or background patterns, while neurotypical subjects have an increased propensity to focus on people's faces.

Fasting helps intestinal stem cells regenerate and heal injuries but also leads to a higher risk of cancer in mice, MIT researchers report. Low-calorie diets and intermittent fasting have been shown to have numerous health benefits: They can delay the onset of some age-related diseases and lengthen lifespan, not only in humans but many other organisms.

As the human population grows, more than half of Earth's land will experience an increasing overlap between humans and animals by 2070, according to a University of Michigan study. Greater human-wildlife overlap could lead to more conflict between people and animals, say the U-M researchers. But understanding where the overlap is likely to occur-and which animals are likely to interact with humans in specific areas-will be crucial information for urban planners, conservationists and countries that have pledged international conservation commitments.

The overlap between humans and animals will increase substantially across much of the planet in less than 50 years due to human population growth and climate change, according to a collaborative study by scientists at the University of Michigan, the University of Washington and University College London.

A study in mice has found that the bacteria Bifidobacterium breve in the mother's gut during pregnancy supports healthy brain development in the fetus. Researchers have compared the development of the fetal brain in mice whose mothers had no bacteria in their gut, to those whose mothers were given Bifidobacterium breve orally during pregnancy, but had no other bacteria in their gut.

Methane-oxidizing bacteria could play a greater role than previously thought in preventing the release of climate-damaging methane from lakes, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, and the Swiss Eawag report. They also show who is behind the process and how it works.

Sea anemone regulates stem cells through evolutionarily conserved genes The sea anemone Nematostella vectensis is potentially immortal. Using molecular genetic methods, developmental biologists led by Ulrich Technau from the University of Vienna have now identified possible candidates for multipotent stem cells in the sea anemone for the first time.

  A discovery by McGill-affiliated researchers could lead to more effective treatment of malaria and other parasitic diseases. When mice are infected in the middle of the night with the parasites causing cerebral malaria, the symptoms of the disease are less severe than for those inflected during the day, and the spread of the parasites within the hosts is more limited, research teams from McGill University, the Douglas Research Centre and the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre have discovered.

A protein found in the saliva of mosquitos that spread Zika and Dengue viruses facilitates viral infection. It could be a target for preventative treatments. Mosquito-borne diseases, such as Dengue fever and Zika, affect over 700 million people worldwide and cause more than one million deaths annually.

Until recently, little was known about Bishop Teodomiro, after St James the Apostle one of the most important figure associated with the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Now, a interdisciplinary investigation has conducted a comprehensive analysis of the potential remains of the bishop using advanced techniques.

Using the largest dataset of human fossils from Ice Age Europe to date, an international research team shows how prehistoric hunter-gatherers coped with climate change in the period between 47,000 and 7,000 years ago.

Study: Auditory cortex encodes lipreading information through spatially distributed activity Lip-read words can be decoded from the brain's auditory regions similarly to heard speech, according to a new University of Michigan report that looked at how vision supports verbal perception. Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging and electrodes implanted in the patients' brains to show that watching someone speak when you can't hear them (lip reading) activates auditory regions of the brain in ways similar to real speech.

Researchers have discovered a way to extend the shelf life of blood stem cells outside the body for use in gene therapy, providing patients with better options and improving their outcomes. We were able to identify a key molecular pathway..that can be targeted by a drug which is already in use and is safe to use.

Writing in The Conversation, Research Fellow Dr Sandra Álvarez-Carretero (UCL Biosciences) explains how her research offers new insights into the origin of life on Earth. Understanding how life began and evolved on Earth is a question that has fascinated humans for a long time, and modern scientists have  made great advances  when it comes to finding some answers.

A new study now published in Science reveals that the memory for a specific experience is stored in multiple parallel "copies". These are preserved for varying durations, modified to certain degrees, and sometimes deleted over time, report researchers at the University of Basel. The ability to turn experiences into memories allows us to learn from the past and use what we learned as a model to respond appropriately to new situations.

Yale researchers uncover how brain cells form precise circuits before experience is able to shape wiring. In humans, the process of learning is driven by different groups of cells in the brain firing together. For instance, when the neurons associated with the process of recognizing a dog begin to fire in a coordinated manner in response to the cells that encode the features of a dog - four legs, fur, a tail, etc.

An international research team has sequenced the largest genomes of all'animals - those of lungfish. The data will help to find out how the ancestors of land vertebrates managed to conquer the mainland. Let's travel back through time to the late Devonian period, around 380 to 360 million years in the past.

Key Takeaways The approach allows scientists to easily study what genes in microbes do. It can be applied to a huge range of isolated organisms or analyze genes derived from microbiome samples with many species mixed together. Initial experiments with the approach have already revealed bacterial functions relevant to human health and future work will investigate functions in ecosystems as well.