Toddlers learn their first words better from people than from Teletubbies, according to new research at Wake Forest University.

The study was published in the June 21 issue of Media Psychology.

Children younger than 22 months may be entertained, but they do not learn words from the television program, said Marina Krcmar, associate professor of communication at Wake Forest and author of the study.

A £9.2m research centre at the University of Nottingham will break new ground in our understanding of plant growth and could lead to the development of drought-resistant crops for developing countries.

The Centre for Plant Integrative Biology (CPIB) will focus on cutting-edge research into plant biology — particularly the little-studied area of root growth, function and response to environmental cues.

Scientists of the Department of Personality, Evaluation and Psychological Treatment of the University of Granada have studied how some psychological variables such as erotophilia (positive attitude towards sexuality), sexual fantasies and anxiety are related to sexual desire in human beings.

The researcher Juan Carlos Sierra Freire states that there are very few reliable and valid instruments in Spain to evaluate sexual desire. Due to this vacuum, the researchers have adapted the Sexual Desire Inventory by Spector, Carey and Steinberg. This inventory is a tool that enables the researcher to measure, on the one hand, the solitary sexual motivation and, on the other hand, the interest in having sexual intercourse with another person (didactic sexual desire).

Picking a mate isn’t easy—if you are a female iguana. In a study Maren Vitousek of Princeton University and colleagues found that female Galápagos marine iguanas spend a lot of energy picking a mate from a wide range of suitors – energy they could otherwise spend foraging, producing eggs, or avoiding predators.

Scientists have generally assumed that being choosy about potential mates carries low costs for females.

A breakthrough announced this week by scientists at the University of Southampton's School of Medicine will lead to greater understanding of noroviruses, the most common cause of non-bacterial gastroenteritis around the world.

Traditionally very little has been known about the biology of noroviruses because of the difficulty in culturing and manipulating these pathogens in the laboratory.

Now the Southampton team, assisted by colleagues at the University of Otago and Washington University Medical School, has devised a system for manipulating the genome of the murine norovirus (MNV) which affects rodents.

The adaptive significance of the unique ability in many primates to distinguish red hues from green ones (i.e., trichromatic color vision) has always enticed debate among evolutionary biologists.

The conventional theory is that primates evolved trichromatic color vision to assist them in foraging, specifically by allowing them to detect red/orange food items from green leaf backgrounds.