Music training, with its pervasive effects on the nervous system’s ability to process sight and sound, may be more important for enhancing verbal communication skills than learning phonics, according to a new Northwestern University study.

Musicians use all of their senses to practice and perform a musical piece. They watch other musicians, read lips, and feel, hear and perform music, thus, engaging multi-sensory skills. As it turns out, the brain’s alteration from the multi-sensory process of music training enhances the same communication skills needed for speaking and reading, the study concludes.

What will we find in the way of planets similar to Earth as we keep expanding our ability to see into the universe?

No one is sure but a team of MIT, NASA, and Carnegie scientists wants to come up with the possibilities. So far they have created models for 14 different types of solid planets that might exist in our galaxy.

The 14 types have various compositions, and the team calculated how large each planet would be for a given mass. Some are pure water ice, carbon, iron, silicate, carbon monoxide, and silicon carbide; others are mixtures of these various compounds.

Yes, you can get paid to imagine new planets. Credit: NASA JPL

Why are some people prejudiced and others are not? The authors of a study in Psychological Science investigate how some individuals are able to avoid prejudicial biases despite the pervasive human tendency to favor one’s own group.

Robert Livingston of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Brian Drwecki of the University of Wisconsin conducted studies that examined white college students who harbored either some or no racial biases.

They found that only seven percent did not show any racial bias (as measured by implicit and explicit psychological tests), and that non-biased individuals differed from biased individuals in a fundamental way -- they were less likely to form negative affective associations in general.

Men who have lower-pitched voices have more children than do men with high-pitched voices, researchers have found. And their study suggests that for reproductive-minded women, mate selection favors men with low-pitched voices.

In previous studies, David Feinberg, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour at McMaster University, and his colleagues have shown that women find deeper male voices to be more attractive, judging them to be more dominant, older, healthier and more masculine sounding.

A review of Dr Lonnie W Aarssen's “Some Bold evolutionary predictions for mating in humans” Quite often papers are published which get slated for being “politically incorrect” I recently witnessed a rather interesting example of that. However when reading papers that acquire this dubious title I find it useful to look at the paper on it’s own merits. Dr Lonnie W. Aarssen’s “Some Bold evolutionary predictions for mating in humans” is an interesting example. My initial impression of the paper is that it simply asserts that human beings are subject to the same mating rules as other primates, and that at some point in the future older social patterns in humans involving marriage and so on would re-assert themselves, because “it is in the genes” However Dr Aarssen’s conclusions are certainly worthy of further debate and have merit.

Brute-force computation has eclipsed humans in chess, and it could soon do the same in the ancient Asian game of Go.

Feng-hsiung Hsu, a key designer of Deep Blue--the IBM computer that in 1997 defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, then the world champion--now proposes to apply the same approach to the vastly more complex Chinese game of Weiqi, known in the West by its Japanese name, Go.

That approach, known as brute-force analysis, exploits the peculiar ability of computers to calculate vast numbers of possible game outcomes while sidestepping their weakness in judgment and planning.

How do we choose our mates? Some scientists have suspected that it is not for looks or fashion or love but rather, genes.

A new study provides support for this idea by looking at lemurs in Madagaskar. Female fat-tailed dwarf lemurs (Cheirogaleus medius) live in life-long pairs, yet notoriously cheat on their partners to improve the genetic fitness of their offspring.

The team headed by Prof. Simone Sommer looked for possible genetic benefits in the obligate pair-living fat-tailed dwarf lemur which maintains life-long pair bonds but has an extremely high rate of extra-pair paternity. Possible mechanisms of female mate choice were investigated by analyzing overall genetic variability as well as a marker of adaptive significance (major histocompatibility complex, MHC-DRB exon 2).

Sometimes it takes two decades to identify something but the wait is worth it. A dinosaur skeleton found 24 years ago in Montana has finally been identified as a new species that links North American dinosaurs with Asian dinosaurs. The dinosaur would have weighed 30 to 40 pounds, walked on two feet and stood about three feet tall. The fossil came from sediment that's about 80 million years old.

Jack Horner said he found the nearly-complete skeleton in 1983 near Choteau, in northwest Montana, but it was located in extremely hard rock and took a long time to prepare. He also had to wait about two decades before he found an expert who could identify it. That expert was Brenda Chinnery, who specializes in horned dinosaurs.

Scientists have proved for the first time that vitamin C is essential for plant growth. Vitamin C is already known to be an antioxidant, which helps plants deal with stresses from drought to ozone and UV radiation, but until now it was not known that plants could not grow without it.

The study in The Plant Journal describes a newly-identified enzyme, GDP-L-galactose phosphorylase, which produces ascorbate ( vitamin C ) in plants. This discovery could have implications for agriculture and for the production of vitamin C dietary supplements.

Professor Nicholas Smirnoff of the University of Exeter, lead author on the paper said: "Vitamin C is the most abundant antioxidant in plants and yet its functions are poorly understood.

A new study in Nature Biotechnology claims their numerical models and lab experiments have confirmed they can improve a class of drugs based on antibodies by predicting structural changes that will improve its effectiveness.

They've already used the model to create a new version of cetuximab, a drug commonly used to treat colorectal cancer, that binds to its target with 10 times greater affinity than the original molecule.

“New and better methods for improving antibody development represent critical technologies for medicine and biotechnology,” says MIT Professor Dane Wittrup.