A 'rather bizarre' result using a robotic frog and recorded mating call may provide insight into how complex traits evolve by hooking together much simpler traits.

Researchers have discovered that two wrong mating calls can make a right for female túngara frogs. It's not a defect in the frog brain, but an example of how well frogs have evolved to extract meaning from noise, much the way humans have. 

The best way to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change is through the use of a European-style cap-and-trade scheme, according to a paper by business school scholars.  

Certain sections of strike-slip faults, known as restraining bends, are sites of unusual tectonic activity because they undergo more contractional motion than surrounding areas.

These bends can be the site of major contraction-dominated earthquakes that are difficult to characterize using traditional means. Over millions of years, these earthquakes build substantial mountain ranges, such as the site of the present study, the Santa Cruz Mountains, California.

Baseball players who have undergone ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) surgery have able to return to the same or higher level of competition for an extended period of time, according to results presented at the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine's (AOSSM) Annual Meeting in Chicago. 

Lake Qinghai is the largest interior plateau lake in North China and has long been sensitive to climate change and the environmental effects of Tibetan Plateau uplift. 

Long, continuous, terrestrial lacustrine sedimentary records are extremely rare but an almost continuous 626 m long sediment core of ancient Lake Qinghai have been obtained from an in-filled part of the southern lake basin, which documents both the age of the origin of the lake and the evolution of the East Asian monsoon during the Late Cenozoic.

The end-Permian mass extinction is the most severe biodiversity crisis in the history of life. 

Immediately after the extinction, many marine taxa suffered a dramatic size reduction (i.e., the 'Lilliput Effect') and compiled data show that recovery from the end-Permian mass extinction was not a smooth process but included several episodes of environmental disturbance and three further episodes of extinction.

The third episode of extinction occurs near the Smithian/Spathian boundary (SSB), around 1.8 million years after the end-Permian extinction and was recently associated to an episode of extreme warmth - true global warming.