Wild birds will sacrifice access to food in order to stay close to their partner over the winter, according to a study by Oxford University researchers.

Scientists from the Department of Zoology found that mated pairs of great tits chose to prioritise their relationships over sustenance in a novel experiment that prevented couples from foraging in the same location.

This also meant birds ended up spending a significant amount of time with their partners' flock-mates.

And, over time, the pairs may even have learned to cooperate to allow each other to scrounge from off-limits feeding stations.

A garnet crystal only one micrometre in diameter was instrumental in a University of Alberta team of physicists creating a route to "lab-on-a-chip" technology for magnetic resonance, a tool to simplify advanced magnetic analysis for device development and interdisciplinary science.

"To most, a gem so tiny would be worthless, but to us, it's priceless," says Mark Freeman, University of Alberta physics professor and Canada Research Chair in condensed matter physics. "It was the perfect testbed for this new method."

A team from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) and its collaborators has sequenced the genomes of two species of small water creatures called acorn worms and showed that we share more genes with them than we do with many other animals, establishing them as our distant cousins.

A new study by scientists in the UK and France has found that Antarctic ice sheet collapse will have serious consequences for sea level rise over the next two hundred years, though not as much as some have suggested.

In many cases, cancer is a lifestyle disease. You are far more likely to get lung cancer if you smoke and the older you get, the more likely you are to get cancer of all kinds. Age is the biggest risk factor and we get more cancer than our ancestors because they died from a lot of other things before cancer could develop.

In civilized war, as oxymoronic as it sounds, hospitals have a cultural bubble around them, neutral territory and off limits. 

But in Syria, that bubble has burst dozens of times, according to a new report from the group Physicians for Human Rights. The hospitals in just the eastern half of Aleppo city have suffered 45 attacks in three years, and two-thirds have closed.

And that may put medical facilities and workers in other conflict zones in danger too, according to a new opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine. 

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - If a baseball player waits until he sees the ball arrive in front of him to swing his bat, he will miss miserably. By the time the batter sees the ball's position, plans his swing and moves the bat, the ball will be firmly in the catcher's mitt.

This time lag is known as sensorimotor delay. University of Louisville researcher Bart Borghuis, Ph.D., has increased our understanding of how people and animals deal with this delay in day-to-day interactions by analyzing the hunting skills of salamanders. His article, 'The Role of Motion Extrapolation in Amphibian Prey Capture,' is published in today's issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

Dark matter is "dark" because no one knows what it is and a blanket term for whatever outnumbers particles of regular matter by more than a factor of 10 is necessary.

Because it can't be detected, dark matter is inferred by gravitational influence in galaxies, and by measuring the mass of a nearby dwarf galaxy called Triangulum II, Assistant Professor of Astronomy Evan Kirby says they may have found the highest concentration of dark matter in any known galaxy. 

What happens to your body in space? NASA's Human Research Program has been trying to provide answers for a decade.

Nature is out to kill us all on earth and space is no different. On top of that, we are isolated from family and friends, exposed to more radiation that could increase lifetime risk for cancer, eat a diet high in freeze-dried food, and work hard all while confined with three co-workers picked by your boss.

Scott Kelly will be the first American to spend nearly one year in space aboard the International Space Station, twice the normal time. One year is a stepping stone to a three-year journey to Mars, should that ever happen, so researchers are eager to learn if existing solutions will be suitable for long, onerous journeys.

Research published today details the first-ever successful elimination of a fatal chytrid fungus in a wild amphibian, marking a major breakthrough in the fight against the disease responsible for devastating amphibian populations worldwide. The highly-infectious chytrid pathogen has severely affected over 700 amphibian species worldwide; driving population declines, extirpations and species extinctions across five continents.