Jamie Samson and Marta Manser from the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental 1Studies at UZH studied colonies of Cape ground squirrels (Xerus inauris) in the wild at the Kalahari Research Center in South Africa. The diurnal rodents temporarily store their food reserves in several hiding places. As their habitat is very arid and sparsely vegetated, points of reference in the environment, such as trees or bushes, are few and far between. The UZH researchers have now discovered how the social rodents orient themselves to find their way back to their temporary food stashes. "The squirrels probably use the position of the sun as the most important cue to roughly adjust their direction of movement," explains Samson.

Position of the sun as a rough guide

EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Laser technology has revealed a common trait of Alzheimer's disease - a sticky situation that could lead to new targets for medicinal treatments.

Alzheimer's statistics are always staggering. The neurodegenerative disease affects an estimated 5 million Americans, one in three seniors dies with Alzheimer's or a form of dementia, it claims more lives than breast and prostate cancers combined, and its incidence is rising.

To help fight this deadly disease, Lisa Lapidus, Michigan State University professor of physics and astronomy, has found that peptides, or strings of amino acids, related to Alzheimer's wiggle at dangerous speeds prior to clumping or forming the plaques commonly associated with Alzheimer's.

TORONTO, September 12, 2016 - Public figures such as United States presidential candidates Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump may have to do a lot more than just say sorry to win back public trust after a misdeed, said a York University researcher whose study on trust was published today.

"Whether it's a boss, co-worker or the public, saying sorry is not always enough to win back broken trust, especially when gender stereotypes are also broken. Both have happened with Clinton and Trump in the last few months," said Shayna Frawley, PhD candidate in human resource management at York U who led the study with York U alumna Jennifer Harrison, now at NEOMA Business School in France.

EAST LANSING, Mich. --- Intelligence -- and not just relentless practice -- plays a significant role in determining chess skill, indicates a comprehensive new study led by Michigan State University researchers.

The research provides some of the most conclusive evidence to date that cognitive ability is linked to skilled performance -- a hotly debated issue in psychology for decades -- and refutes theories that expertise is based solely on intensive training.

A new study by psychologists from the University of Liverpool and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) reveals that collaborating in a group to remember information is harmful.

The research, conducted by Dr Craig Thorley, the University's Department of Psychological Sciences, and Dr Stéphanie Marion, from UOIT's Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, statistically analysed 64 earlier collaborative remembering studies and found that groups recall less than their individual members would if working alone.

The same study also found that collaborative remembering boosts later individual learning: people who previously recall in a group remember more than those who do not.

Democratic Presidential contender Hillary Clinton is back on the campaign trail after the 68-year-old rested at her home in Chappaqua, New York for a few days last week following what appeared to be a dizzy spell during a visit to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2016.

Occasionally in science there are theories that refuse to die despite the overwhelming evidence against them. The “aquatic ape hypothesis” is one of these, now championed by Sir David Attenborough in his recent BBC Radio 4 series The Waterside Ape.

The hypothesis suggests that everything from walking upright to our lack of hair, from holding our breath to eating shellfish could be because an aquatic phase in our ancestry.

The 2012 measurements of the Higgs boson, performed by ATLAS and CMS on 7- and 8-TeV datasets collected during Run 1 of the LHC, were a giant triumph of fundamental physics, which conclusively showed the correctness of the theoretical explanation of electroweak symmetry breaking conceived in the 1960s.

The Higgs boson signals found by the experiments were strong and coherent enough to convince physicists as well as the general public, but at the same time the few small inconsistencies unavoidably present in any data sample, driven by statistical fluctuations, were a stimulus for fantasy interpretations. Supersymmetry enthusiasts, in particular, saw the 125 GeV boson as the first found of a set of five. SUSY in fact requires the presence of at least five such states.

The physics of nanometer sized bubbles is mysterious and controversial. Gas bubbles in liquids are unstable.[2] Also large air bubbles in water are not stable. Even if we keep them somehow from rising to the surface and popping, the surface tension of the bubble itself presses the air out of the bubble and into the liquid! The physicist calls this ‘Laplace pressure’.[3] We do not notice this with large bubbles. However, with a nanobubble, the Laplace pressure dissolves it in a few micro seconds.

With one in two Australian children reported to have tooth decay in their permanent teeth by age 12, researchers from the University of Sydney believe they have identified some nanoscale elements that govern the behaviour of our teeth.

Material and structures engineers worked with dentists and bioengineers to map the exact composition and structure of tooth enamel at the atomic scale.

Using a relatively new microscopy technique called atom probe tomography, their work produced the first-ever three-dimensional maps showing the positions of atoms critical in the decay process.