In the fall, eastern North American monarch butterflies take the biggest trip of their lives to their wintering grounds in Mexico. The butterflies are genetically hardwired to fly southwest mainly using a time-compensated sun compass, which combines the time of day and the position of the sun to navigate. To understand how this information connects in the butterfly brain, researchers reporting April 14 in Cell Reports created a mathematical model that can reproduce the animals' internal calculations.

Our brains work on inductance, that is why electricity can take us to a very weird place. But safe levels of electrical stimulation can enhance your capacity to think more creatively, according to a new paper in Cerebral Cortex.

Scientists from MIPT's Laboratory of the Biophysics of Excitable Systems have discovered how to control the behaviour of heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) using laser radiation; this study will help scientists to better understand the mechanisms of the heart and could ultimately provide a method of treating arrhythmia. The paper has been published in the journal PLOS ONE.

"Right now this result may be very useful for clinical studies of the mechanisms of the heart, and in the future we could potentially stop attacks of arrhythmia in patients at the touch of a button," says the corresponding author of the study and head of MIPT's Laboratory of the Biophysics of Excitable Systems, Prof. Konstantin Agladze.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- University of Florida Health researchers have slowed a notoriously aggressive type of brain tumor in mouse models by using a low-carbohydrate diet.

A high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet that included a coconut oil derivative helped reduce the growth of glioblastoma tumor cells and extended lifespan in mouse models by 50 percent, researchers found. The results were published recently in the journal Clinical Cancer Research.

Glioblastoma, the most common brain tumor in adults, has no effective long-term treatment and on average, patients live for 12 to 15 months after diagnosis, according to the National Cancer Institute.

How did the eruptions of Katmai, Taupo and Santorini grow into a massive blast that spewed fine ash, sulfur and crystal-poor magma into the atmosphere? New research from Georgia Institute of Technology and Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zurich (ETH) suggests they occurred due in part to how light vapor bubbles migrate and accumulate in some parts of shallow volcanic chambers. The findings are published online by Nature.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Commitment to family is both a driving force and source of hardship for Latino immigrants, according to a Florida State University researcher.

Threats to familismo -- deeply held cultural beliefs about the centrality of family in daily life -- are often a major source of stress for immigrants and can have a negative impact on their overall health and well-being as they move forward in a new country.

Joseph Grzywacz, the Norejane Hendrickson professor of Family and Child Sciences at Florida State, outlined those findings in an article that will be published in an upcoming issue of Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology. It is available now online.

• Many meat-eating dinosaurs may have been expert scavengers, like hyenas are today

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Using DNA collected from corn grown by immigrant farmers in Los Angeles and Riverside, researchers at the University of California, Riverside have found the genetic diversity of corn in some home and community gardens in Southern California far exceeds levels found in commercially available seeds.

The researchers cautioned that this is a preliminary study with a small sample size. Future research would expand to include a greater number of gardens, and focus on characteristics of the corn, such as tolerance to drought, difference in cob size and flowering time.

ATLANTA - Month date, 2016-While use of the standard therapy leading to the best outcome against locally advanced rectal cancer has increased over the past decade, only half of patients currently receive it, according to a new study. The authors of the study say the underutilization could be explained in part by socioeconomic factors. The study appears early online in the American Cancer Society's peer-review journal Cancer.

The fungal pathogen Batrachochrytrium dendrobatridis (Bd), which has been known to cause the disease chytridiomycosis and decimate frog populations for close to half a century, is causing frogs to evolve around it, according to a new study which took a step toward identifying the genetic mechanisms that makes some frogs resistant to Bd infections in their study of lowland leopard frogs in Arizona.