Researchers have long been puzzled by large societies in which
strangers routinely engage in voluntary acts of kindness and respect even though there is often an individual cost involved.

Evolutionary forces associated with kinship and reciprocity can explain such cooperative behavior among other primates, but the same isn't true for large societies of strangers.

A new study published today in Science suggests that the cooperative nature of each society may be explained in part by religious beliefs and the growth of market transactions. The study also found the extent to which a society uses punishment to enforce norms increases and decreases with the number of people in the society.

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego are undertaking an expedition to explore the rupture site of the 8.8-magnitude Chilean earthquake.

The team hopes to capitalize on a unique opportunity to capture fresh data from the event by studying changes in the seafloor that resulted from movements along faults and submarine landslides.

The "rapid response" expedition, called the Survey of Earthquake And Rupture Offshore Chile, will take place aboard the research vessel Melville.


Scientists will map the rupture site of the 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile.

A Penn State physicist is looking at how songbirds transmit impulses through nerve cells in the brain to produce a complex behavior, such as singing.

The research will help scientists gain insight into how the human brain functions, which may lead to a better understanding of complex vocal behavior, human speech production and ultimately, speech disorders and related diseases.

The findings were presented this week at the American Physical Society's March meeting in Portland.

Songbirds are particularly well suited for studying speech production and syntax -- the rules of syllable or word sequence -- because there are more similarities between birdsong and human speech than one may initially think.

Genetic engineering may one day turn the Anopheles mosquito, the transmitter of malaria, into a natural 'flying vaccinator' for the disease, a new study in Insect Molecular Biology suggests.

Scientists have successfully generated a transgenic mosquito expressing the Leishmania vaccine within its saliva. Bites from the insect succeeded in raising antibodies, indicating successful immunization with the vaccine through blood feeding.

The research, led by Associate Professor Shigeto Yoshida from the Jichi Medical University in Japan, targets the saliva gland of the mosquitoes, the main vectors of human malaria.

Butterflies are emerging over 10 days earlier in Spring than they did 65 years ago, and anthropogenic global warming is probably at fault, according to a study in Biology Letters.  

The study found that mean emergence date for adults of the Common Brown butterfly (Heteronympha merope) has shifted 1.6 days earlier per decade in Melbourne, Australia. Early emergence is causally linked with a simultaneous increase in air temperatures around Melbourne of approximately 0.14°C per decade, and this warming is known to be human-induced.

Dogs likely originated in the Middle East, according to a new genetic analysis published this week in Nature.

The study reports genetic data from more than 900 dogs from 85 breeds and more than 200 wild gray wolves (the ancestor of domestic dogs) worldwide, including populations from North America, Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. Researchers used molecular genetic techniques to analyze more than 48,000 genetic markers.

The data include samples from Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran — but they have not pinpointed a specific location in the Middle East where dogs originated.