Men who have lower-pitched voices have more children than do men with high-pitched voices, researchers have found. And their study suggests that for reproductive-minded women, mate selection favors men with low-pitched voices.

In previous studies, David Feinberg, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour at McMaster University, and his colleagues have shown that women find deeper male voices to be more attractive, judging them to be more dominant, older, healthier and more masculine sounding.

Brute-force computation has eclipsed humans in chess, and it could soon do the same in the ancient Asian game of Go.

Feng-hsiung Hsu, a key designer of Deep Blue--the IBM computer that in 1997 defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, then the world champion--now proposes to apply the same approach to the vastly more complex Chinese game of Weiqi, known in the West by its Japanese name, Go.

That approach, known as brute-force analysis, exploits the peculiar ability of computers to calculate vast numbers of possible game outcomes while sidestepping their weakness in judgment and planning.

Sometimes it takes two decades to identify something but the wait is worth it. A dinosaur skeleton found 24 years ago in Montana has finally been identified as a new species that links North American dinosaurs with Asian dinosaurs. The dinosaur would have weighed 30 to 40 pounds, walked on two feet and stood about three feet tall. The fossil came from sediment that's about 80 million years old.

Jack Horner said he found the nearly-complete skeleton in 1983 near Choteau, in northwest Montana, but it was located in extremely hard rock and took a long time to prepare. He also had to wait about two decades before he found an expert who could identify it. That expert was Brenda Chinnery, who specializes in horned dinosaurs.

A new study in Nature Biotechnology claims their numerical models and lab experiments have confirmed they can improve a class of drugs based on antibodies by predicting structural changes that will improve its effectiveness.

They've already used the model to create a new version of cetuximab, a drug commonly used to treat colorectal cancer, that binds to its target with 10 times greater affinity than the original molecule.

“New and better methods for improving antibody development represent critical technologies for medicine and biotechnology,” says MIT Professor Dane Wittrup.

The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) is a collaboration of over 315 institutional investors with assets under management of more than $41 trillion. They have released their 5th annual global report, providing the largest and most comprehensive database of strategies from the world's largest corporations regarding the impact of climate change on shareholder value.

On behalf of the collaboration of 315 investors, including Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, CalPERS and AIG, CDP has sent a questionnaire to the world's largest publicly-owned companies each year since 2002. This elicits detailed information on the risks and opportunities posed to the companies by climate change.

Every response has been graded and ranked based on climate disclosure and governance practices.

Six months of acupuncture treatment appears to be more effective than conventional therapy in treating low back pain, according to a study in the Sept. 24 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, although the study suggests that both sham acupuncture and traditional Chinese verum acupuncture appear to be effective in treating low back pain.

“Low back pain is a common, impairing and disabling condition, often long-term, with an estimated lifetime prevalence of 70 percent to 85 percent,” the authors write as background information in the article.

For more than 100 years, scientists have tried to figure out the cell size problem: How does a cell know when it is big enough to divide? In research conducted in budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), scientists at Rockefeller University have now identified the cellular event that marks the moment when a cell knows it is big enough to commit to cell division and spawn genetic replicas of itself.

The findings provide a precise and quantitative framework for studying the possible mechanisms that allow cells to monitor and sense their size.

During the first phase of the cell cycle, known as G1, budding yeast grows and begins to form a bud; in the final stage, the cell splits into two — one bigger than the other.

A University of Leicester mathematician has been working with scientists in Japan and The Netherlands to develop a new technique that produces accurate mathematical models of the actual behaviour of nerve (neural) cells. Developing such models requires detailed information about the dynamics of components responsible for the spike generation in the cell.

The main barrier between mathematical modelling and reality is that the most of intrinsic variables of living cell are not available for direct observation. Dr Ivan Tyukin and his colleagues developed a method for automatic reconstructing of hidden variables describing the cell dynamics using only the recordings of evoked electric activity of the cell.

Sonia Garel intend to tackle one of the great mysteries of neurobiology - how the brain is built up during embryonic development. There have long been fundamental unanswered questions relating both to the wiring of the brain during growth, and how evolution drove forward the sophisticated neural circuitry associated with mammals.

Garel will focus on two key processes involved in development of neural circuitry in the forebrains of young mammals as they grow. One of these processes concerns the formation of connections between neurons, the nerve cells of the brain.

These connections are needed to process sensory information, execute motor functions, and provide the network for cognitive abilities.