Writing in PNAS, a group of researchers says they have determined the first pervasive 'rule' of evolution - that animals become increasingly more complex.

Examining the last 550 million years of the fossil catalog, the team investigated the different evolutionary branches of the crustacean family tree. They were seeking examples along the tree where animals evolved that were simpler than their ancestors.

Instead they found organisms with increasingly more complex structures and features, suggesting that there is some mechanism driving change in this direction.

The bystander effect suggests that the more witnesses there are to an emergency, the less likely an individual bystander is to intervene. This phenomenon was identified as a particular consequence of the assault and murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964, which was witnessed by some 38 people, all of whom remained bystanders and failed to come to Kitty’s aid.

Scientists have been unable to study the bystander effect, even under controlled conditions, due to ethical and practical reasons. However, researchers say advanced animated humans and environments created by the National Centre for Computer Animation (NCCA) at Bournemouth, University will give scientists a unique opportunity to test the bystander effect in the context of a ‘controlled’ immersive virtual environment.

Does Coke in a glass bottle taste better? Perhaps. A chemical combination can certainly interact different with glass than it does with plastic. If the can for your cream soda changes its design, you make like it less, detracting from the overall experience, but that doesn't mean it tastes different.

When it comes to taste, containers make a difference in actual flavor. Not so with sight, though a good design may entail a more positive reception. A study in the April issue of the Journal of Consumer Research says that 'touch' also falls into the important category when it comes to flavor.

It may be only St. Patrick's Day but it's never too early to think about July 4th fireworks. Plus, 'green' has two meanings today.

Most kids love fireworks. They make pretty colors and loud noises - but they're not terribily friendly toward the environment. A group of researchers is working on that.

“No other application in the field of chemistry has such a positive association for the general population as fireworks,” says Thomas Klapötke from the University of Munich. “However, pyrotechnical applications are significant polluters of the environment.”

Fungi don't have sexes, they have mating types, but a new study in PLoS says there are similarities between the parts of DNA that determine the sex of plants and animals and the parts of DNA that determine mating types in certain fungi.

It makes fungi interesting as new model organisms in studies of the evolutionary development of sex chromosomes.

In the plant and animal kingdoms there are individuals of different sexes, that is, bearers of either many tiny sex cells (males) or a few large ones (females). In the third eukaryote kingdom (organisms with DNA gathered in the cell nucleus), the fungi kingdom, there are no sexes but rather a simpler and more primitive system of different so-called mating types. These are distinguished by different variants of a few specific genes.

Stegography is an ancient technique of hiding data within data. Unlike encryption, it isn't obviously encrypted. Today it is used to take advantage of unused bits of data in images or audio/video files to transmit secrets.

The basic concept of understanding the hidden data in files can also be used in understanding computer networks and biology, says Weixiong Zhang, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of computer science. He and his co-authors writing in Physical Review E say they have created an algorithm to automatically discover communities and their subtle structures in various networks, including biological ones. They used it to identify the community structure of a network of co-expressed genes involved in bacterial sepsis.