If a woman's female relatives have fraternal twins, she is more likely to give birth to twins herself, but the genes behind this phenomenon have remained a mystery. Now, researchers reporting April 28 in the American Journal of Human Genetics have nailed down two genes associated with twinning. They show genetic links between having twins and female production of, and response to, follicle-stimulating hormone, which may help predict how some women respond to infertility treatments.

A new study reveals that the sleep patterns previously thought exclusive to mammals and birds - REM and slow-wave sleep patterns - are also found in reptiles. The results shake up our understanding of the evolution of sleep. Amniotes are a group of tetrapod vertebrates comprising reptiles, birds and mammals. Because slow-wave sleep (SWS) and rapid eye movement sleep (REMS) are thought to be exclusive to mammals and birds, it's believed that these sleep states evolved twice after mammals and birds diverged from reptiles. However, results by Mark Shein-Idelson et al. now reveal SWS and REM sleep patterns in the Australian bearded dragon, Pogona vitticeps, suggesting that the sleep states may have evolved in a common ancestor of all amniotes, more than 300 million years ago.

Studying the way that solitary hunters such as tigers, bears or sea turtles chase down their prey turns out to be very useful in understanding the interaction between individual white blood cells and colonies of bacteria. Reporting their results in the Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical, researchers in Europe have created a numerical model that explores this behaviour in more detail.

Using mathematical expressions, the group can examine the dynamics of a single predator hunting a herd of prey. The routine splits the hunter's motion into a diffusive part and a ballistic part, which represent the search for prey and then the direct chase that follows.

How does the image-recognition technology in a self-driving car respond to a blurred shape suddenly appearing on the road? Researchers from KU Leuven, Belgium, have shown that machines can learn to respond to unfamiliar objects like human beings would.

Imagine heading home in your self-driving car. The rain is falling in torrents and visibility is poor. All of a sudden, a blurred shape appears on the road. What would you want the car to do? Should it hit the brakes, at the risk of causing the cars behind you to crash? Or should it just keep driving?

A research team led by an award-winning genomicist at Western University has developed a new method for identifying mutations and prioritizing variants in breast and ovarian cancer genes, which will not only reduce the number of possible variants for doctors to investigate, but also increase the number of patients that are properly diagnosed.

These potentially game-changing technologies, developed by Peter Rogan, PhD, students and his collaborators from Western's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, reveal gene variants that were missed by conventional genetic testing.

New research published today in the journal Scientific Reports has revealed for the first time that half of the world's farmed fish have hearing loss due to a deformity of the earbone.

Like humans, fish have ears which are essential for hearing and balance, so the findings are significant for the welfare of farmed fish as well as the survival of captive-bred fish released into the wild for conservation purposes.

The University of Melbourne-led study found that half of the world's most farmed marine fish, Atlantic salmon, have a deformity of the otolith or 'fish earbone', much like the inner ear of mammals. The deformity was found to be very uncommon in wild fish.

What if a map of the brain could help us decode people's inner thoughts?

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have taken a step in that direction by building a "semantic atlas" that shows in vivid colors and multiple dimensions how the human brain organizes language. The atlas identifies brain areas that respond to words that have similar meanings.

The findings, to be published April 28, 2016 in the journal Nature, are based on a brain imaging study that recorded neural activity while study volunteers listened to stories from the "Moth Radio Hour." They show that at least one-third of the brain's cerebral cortex, including areas dedicated to high-level cognition, is involved in language processing.

Brown fat cells can burn fat to generate heat. University of Bonn researchers have discovered a new method to measure the activity of brown fat cells in humans and mice. The researchers showed that microRNA-92a can be used as an indirect measure for the activity of energy consuming brown fat cells. They showed that a small blood sample was sufficient. Results were published in Nature Communications, a well-known scientific journal.

People who want to lose weight often encounter boundaries: No matter what diet they try, the pounds won't drop. Being overweight and obese can have severe health consequences, and has shown to increase a person's chance of developing type-2-diabetes or cardiovascular diseases.