Bats are the most vocal mammals other than humans, and understanding how they communicate during their nocturnal outings could lead to better treatments for human speech disorders, say researchers at Texas A&M University.

Thousands of bats native to Central Texas fly overhead each night singing songs of complex syllables – but at frequencies too high for humans to hear.

Texas A&M researcher Michael Smotherman is trying to understand how Mexican Freetail bats organize syllables into songs and how their communication is linked to the brain.

Research released today reveals the first ever index to pinpoint Britain's biggest energy-saving influencers. With 169 people in their social networks Britons are already acting as advisers to 10 people on energy-related issues. The report shows that just if just 0.59% of the population, i.e. one person in 200 (equivalent to the population of Manchester), tells every single person in their network what they have done to save energy, the entire UK population could be reached.

The influencer index splits the public into four types - it shows that women are leading the way, as they make up over half (53%) of the most influential group ('Community Changers').

Help with assigning gender could one day be at hand for intersex individuals whose genital phenotypes and sex chromosomes don't match, thanks to the discovery of a stable sex hormone signature in our cells.

Researchers have shown for the first time that testosterone leaves an irreversible molecular signature in cells that may provide a far more sophisticated way to look at sex than just ascertaining the presence of the Y chromosome. A team of researchers from the US and Germany were able to pinpoint the role of testosterone by comparing individuals with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) to people without CAIS. The findings provide a platform for future work that may lead to improved counselling for those whose gender is ambiguous.

Your height in adult life significantly affects your quality of life, with short people reporting worse physical and mental health than people of normal height. The study shows that adult height is linked to how good a person thinks their health is. Short people judge their state of health to be significantly lower than their normal height peers do.

The data for this study came from the 2003 Health Survey for England, carried out by the UK Department of Health(1). In this survey, participants filled out a health-related quality of life (HRQoL) questionnaire and a nurse measured their height. Researchers, led by Senior Health Economist Torsten Christensen at Novo Nordisk A/S in Denmark, used this data to assess the relationship between height and HRQoL.

While showing impressive growth prenatally, the human brain is not completed at birth. There is considerable brain growth during childhood with dynamic changes taking place in the human brain throughout life, probably for adaptation to our environments.

Evidence is accumulating that brain structure is under considerable genetic influence [Peper et al., 2007]. Puberty, the transitional phase from childhood into adulthood, involves changes in brain morphology that may be essential to optimal adult functioning. Around the onset of puberty gray matter volume starts to decrease, while white matter volume is still increasing [Giedd et al., 1999].

The presence in the environment of large quantities of toxic metals such as mercury, lead, cadmium, zinc or others, poses serious health risks to humans, and this threat puts the scientific community under pressure to develop new methods to detect and eliminate toxic contaminants from wastewaters in efficient and economically viable ways.

Resulting from the combination of water treatment investigations with the latest in material science, a new type of nanomaterial called nanostructured silica has been found to fulfill the requisites necessary for these applications.