Intimidation and threats are common throughout society, whether it’s in the school playground, sporting arena or boardroom. Threatening behaviour is equally widespread among non-human animals.

Individuals signal their superior strength to competitors to obtain food, resolve territorial disputes and acquire mates. Current theory insists that signals of strength should be honest. Surprisingly researchers have found that dishonest signals are used routinely during dominance disputes by male Australian crayfish.

Scientists at the University of Nevada, Reno are at the forefront on a number of seismological fields, including helping the world better determine whether an earthquake is big enough to generate an ocean-wide tsunami.

Through work at the Nevada Seismological Laboratory on the Nevada campus, important data on seismological events throughout the world is compiled, including Monday’s fatal occurrence in the Solomon Islands, where at least 13 people were killed. Tsunamis triggered by an undersea earthquake crashed ashore and wiped away entire villages and set off alerts from Australia to Hawaii.

In the event of a nuclear or radiological catastrophe -- such as a nuclear accident or a “dirty bomb” -- thousands of people would be exposed to radiation, with no way of quickly determining how much of the deadly substance has seeped inside their bodies. Scientists at Duke University Medical Center have developed a new blood test to rapidly detect levels of radiation exposure so that potentially life-saving treatments could be administered to the people who need them most.

There appears to be a critical window of 48 to 72 hours for administering treatments aimed at halting the devastating effects of radiation, said senior study investigator John Chute, M.D., an associate professor of medicine in the Duke Adult Bone Marrow and Stem Cell Transplant Program.

A new study coordinated by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society and other groups found that Central Africa’s increasing network of roads – which are penetrating deeper and deeper into the wildest areas of the Congo Basin – are becoming highways of death for the little known forest elephant. The study, which appears in the journal Public Library of Science, concludes that forest elephants are severely impacted by ivory poachers who use roads to gain access into their remote jungle home. In addition, roads serve as conduits of advancing human settlement fragmenting previously intact forests where elephants live.

Cartilaginous fishes (sharks, rays, skates, and chimaeras) are the phylogenetically oldest group of living jawed vertebrates. They are also an important outgroup for understanding the evolution of bony vertebrates such as human and teleost fishes. In a new study published online this week in the open access journal PLoS Biology, Byrappa Venkatesh, Sydney Brenner, and colleagues performed survey sequencing (1.4× coverage) of a chimaera, the elephant shark (Callorhinchus milii).

Whose tastes do you trust more? The person who loves the same things you love? Or the person who hates the same things you hate? Turns out, when we’re looking for advice, positivity reigns. A new study reveals that we trust those who love the same things we love more than those who hate the same things we hate. As the researchers explain in the March issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, "There are few ways that products are loved, but many ways that they are hated."

A new molecular "fishing" technique developed by researchers at Duke University and Duke's Pratt School of Engineering lays the groundwork for future advances in hand-held sensing devices.

Hand-held devices used for medical testing or environmental and food-safety monitoring could quickly and precisely measure concentrations of virtually any chemical substance, including blood proteins, toxic pollutants and dangerous biological agents, in a test solution, according to the researchers.

Coelacanths are lobe-finned fish, which vary in size but can reach up to 6.4 feet in length and weigh up to 176 pounds. Scientists have inferred that they can live 80 to 100 years. Their closest living relatives are lungfish and as fossils they can be readily identified by their distinctive ‘tail flag’. They were long thought to be extinct because their fossil record seems to disappear quite abruptly along with the dinosaurs and many other creatures at end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago.

Treatment of mice with a ‘friendly’ bacteria, normally found in the soil, altered their behavior in a way similar to that produced by antidepressant drugs, reports research published in the latest issue of Neuroscience.

These findings, identified by researchers at the University of Bristol and colleagues at University College London, aid the understanding of why an imbalance in the immune system leaves some individuals vulnerable to mood disorders like depression.

Tree frogs have the unique ability to stick to smooth surfaces even when they are tilted well beyond the vertical - some small tree frogs can even adhere when completely upside down. Conversely when walking or jumping they can detach their toe pads easily. Researchers from the University of Glasgow will present insights into how this fascinating ability is controlled at the Society for Experimental Biology’s Annual Meeting in Glasgow, UK.

“The toe pads of tree frogs are coated with a thin mucus which adhere to surfaces by wet adhesion, like wet tissue paper sticking to glass.