The team, led by James Cook University's Associate Professor Eric Roberts, discovered the oldest known example of fungus gardens within fossil termite nests from the Great Rift Valley of Africa in 25 million year old sediments.

Fungus farming termite colonies cultivate fungi in gardens in subterranean nests or chambers, helping to convert plant material into a more easily digestible food source for the termites.

Assoc Prof Roberts said that scientists had previously used DNA from modern termites to estimate the origin of termite 'fungus farming' behavior back to at least 25 to 30 million years ago.

Every year as mosquito season arrives, so does West Nile virus, causing fever in thousands of people nationwide and life-threatening brain infections in an unlucky few. About half the people who survive that infection - West Nile encephalitis - are left with permanent neurological deficits such as memory loss.

New research shows that these long-term neurological problems may be due to the patient's own immune system destroying parts of their neurons, which suggests that intervening in the immune response may help prevent brain damage or help patients recover.

The study is published June 22 in Nature.

Researchers from Disney Research and Shanghai's Fudan University have used deep learning techniques to train computer software to recognize events in videos, even categories of events that the software has not previously seen.

Their approach uses both scene and object features from the video and enables associations between these visual elements and each type of event to be automatically determined and weighted by a machine-learning architecture known as a neural network.

Traditionally, the evolutionary development of an insect species has been explained by the notion that the female insect chooses her male partner based on size and other factors, so-called assortative mating. These mating patterns have also been believed to partially explain how the isolation between different species is maintained.

However, new research from Lund University in Sweden shows just the opposite: assortative mating breaks down the sexual barrier between species rather than preserves it, which could lead to species becoming extinct. This discovery can be of significance within nature and species conservation.

Computer vision systems typically learn how to recognize an object by analyzing images of thousands of examples. But scientists at Disney Research have shown that computers also can learn to recognize objects they have never seen before, based in part on studying vocabulary.

People, after all, can get an idea of what things might look like based on reading a book. Similarly, a computer that already has been taught to recognize certain objects - apples, for instance - can analyze word use to get hints about the existence of fruits such as pears and peaches, and how they might differ from apples, said Leonid Sigal, senior research scientist at Disney Research.

Sodium-based batteries have drawn considerable attention as a prospective alternative to lithium-based batteries due to the abundance and low price of sodium element. However, finding a suitable anode material has been a long-standing critical task before the commercialization of sodium-based batteries. As the size of sodium atom is much larger than that of lithium atom, many anode materials widely used in lithium-based batteries show poor performance in sodium-based batteries, most of which suffering from low intercalation utility, slow kinetics and sever volume expansion.

Coral cannot survive on its own for long. It needs to create a symbiotic relationship with algae to survive. Algae provides approximately 90 percent of the energy coral needs, which means that their partnership must be preserved in order to keep the coral healthy. In order to protect coral, algae, and the marine species that live in reef environments, scientists need to know more about how the symbiotic relationship between coral and algae begins. In collaboration with Amin Mohamed and Prof. David Miller at James Cook University, Prof. Noriyuki Satoh and Dr. Chuya Shinzato of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), found changes in coral gene expression when introduced to algae. They have recently published their results in Molecular Ecology.

All life on the planet relies, in one way or another, on a process called carbon fixation: the ability of plants, algae and certain bacteria to "pump" carbon dioxide (CO2) from the environment, add solar or other energy and turn it into the sugars that are the required starting point needed for life processes. At the top of the food chain are different organisms (some of which think, mistakenly, that they are "more advanced") that use the opposite means of survival: they eat sugars (made by photosynthetic plants and microorganisms) and then release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Eukaryotic microalgae are increasingly important for the sustainable production of environmental friendly, renewable biochemicals and biofuels. Recent technological advances in genomics and physiology of algae to produce industrially relevant products combined with advanced tools for genetic manipulation have enabled bioengineering of new strains of algae that heretofore had been impossible. The complexity of the eukaryotic genome (having nuclear, chloroplastic and mitochondrial genomes) provides challenges but opportunities that are not possible in prokaryotic systems.