Cichlid fish in Lake Malawi know how to court and their courtship evolves - fast. 

In the shallows where the light is good, males build sand castles to attract females, while deep-dwelling species dig less elaborate pits and compensate with longer swimming displays, according to a new study. 

A new map of the Moon's strangest volcano show that its explosive eruption spread debris over an area in the Compton-Belkovich Volcanic Complex much greater than previously thought.

By mapping the radioactive element thorium which spewed out during the eruption, they discovered that, with the help of the Moon's low gravity, debris from the unnamed volcano was able to cover an area the size of Scotland, or around 70,000 km2. The eruption, which happened 3.5 billion years ago, threw rock five times further than the pyroclastic flow of molten rock and hot gases that buried the Roman city of Pompeii, the researchers added.

A tiny parasite named Pleistophora mulleri not only significantly increases cannibalism among the indigenous shrimp Gammarus duebeni celticus but made infected shrimp more voracious, taking much less time to consume their victims. 

Cannibalism is fairly common in nature but the belief was always that it is practical - meat is meat. Consumption of juveniles by adults is a normal feature of the shrimp's feeding patterns, but this is the first paper to show parasites cause it and even alter the feeding patterns -  shrimp infected with the parasite ate twice as much of their own kind as uninfected animals. They attacked juvenile shrimp more often and consumed them more quickly than did uninfected shrimp.

Astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets in our Milky Way galaxy using the Kepler satellite and many of them have multiple planets orbiting the host star.

By analyzing these planetary systems, researchers from the Australian National University and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen have calculated the probability for the number of stars in the Milky Way that might have planets in the habitable zone.

The calculations show that billions of the stars in the Milky Way will have one to three planets in the habitable zone, where there is the potential for liquid water and where life could exist. The results are published in the scientific journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 

Metastatic melanoma is the leading cause of skin cancer deaths in the United States; once melanoma has spread (metastasized), life expectancy for patients can be dramatically shortened. At present, the reference therapy for patients diagnosed with metastatic melanoma is Dacarbazine (DTIC), which is associated with poor patient outcomes.

An FDA-approved drug for high blood pressure, guanabenz, prevents myelin loss and alleviates clinical symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS) in animal models, according to a new study. The drug appears to enhance an innate cellular mechanism that protects myelin-producing cells against inflammatory stress. These findings point to promising avenues for the development of new therapeutics against MS, report scientists from the University of Chicago in Nature Communications on Mar. 13.