Scientists writing in BMC Ecology say the "giggle" sound made by spotted hyenas has revealed that the animals' laughter encodes information about age, dominance and identity.
 
Researchers recorded the calls of 26 hyenas in captivity and found that variations in the giggles' pitch and timbre may help hyenas to establish social hierarchies.

"The hyena's laugh gives receivers cues to assess the social rank of the emitting individual. This may allow hyenas to establish feeding rights and organize their food-gathering activities," said Frédéric Theunissen, a researcher the University of California at Berkeley.

In a study sure to delight the Lamarckian in you, and not part of our annual April Fool's Day science content, a new study by Royal Holloway, University of London, says Iraqi children born in areas affected by high levels of violence are shorter in height than children born in less violent areas.

Not factored in; whether or not the Baathists who live in the nice, less-violent areas and have money marry taller women, though look for that in a follow-up.

Consumers continue to click on spam despite awareness of how bots and viruses spread through risky email behavior, according to the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG). Their findings were based on a survey it released today covering North America and Western Europe and said that even though over eighty percent of email users are aware of the existence of bots, tens of millions respond to spam in ways that could leave them vulnerable to a malware infection.

Depictions of bioethical issues and professionalism portrayed in two popular medical dramas—"Grey's Anatomy" and "House, M.D."—suggest that the shows are "rife" with ethical dilemmas and actions that often run afoul of professional codes of conduct, according to a review in the Journal of Medical Ethics

The authors admit that their findings would end up stating the obvious. But they nonetheless wanted to provide data that would explain how these depictions influence the perceptions of viewers, both health professionals and the general public.

They also hope the research will inform discussions about whether medical dramas should be shown in a classroom to spur conversations about ethics and professionalism among medical and nursing students.

University students have developed a computer game that is operated by eye movements, which could allow people with severe physical disabilities to become 'gamers' for the first time.

The technology behind the game may one day be adapted to create more sophisticated games and applications such as wheelchairs and computer cursors controlled by eye movements.

The researchers adapted an open source game called 'Pong', where a player moves a bat to hit a ball as it bounces around the screen. The adaptation enables the player to move the bat using their eye.

The "exceptionally simple theory of everything," proposed by physicist Antony Garrett Lisi in 2007 does not hold water, according to a particle physicist and mathematician writing in Communications in Mathematical Physics.

In November of 2007, Lisi published an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything." The paper centered on the elegant mathematical structure known as E8, which also appears in string theory. First identified in 1887, E8 has 248 dimensions and cannot be seen, or even drawn, in its complete form.