A new genus and species of carnivorous amphibian from western Pennsylvania, Fedexia striegeli, provides the earliest widespread evidence of terrestrial Vertebrates, say researchers from Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The fossil skull, found in 2004 near Pittsburgh International Airport, was recovered from rocks deposited approximately 300 million years ago during the Late Pennsylvanian Period.  The rocks where Fedexia was found are nearly 20 million years older than the localities of its fossil relatives, suggesting that the expansion and diversification of this group occurred much earlier than had been recognized previously. 

The findings are detailed  in the Annals of Carnegie Museum

If you're trying to pick winners for this year's NCAA basketball tournament, ignore a team's seeding, which is statistically insignificant after the Sweet Sixteen, a new Journal of Gambling Business and Economics study reports.

The paper suggests that picking the higher-seeded team to beat a lower-seeded opponent usually works only in the first three rounds of the tournament. Once the tournament enters the Elite Eight round, a team's seed in the tournament is irrelevant.

Babies may be born with a predisposition to dance and find music - specifically, rhythm and tempo - more engaging than speech, according to a study of infants aged between five months and two years old.

While predisposition towards music may be innate, researchers are unsure why it developed in humans. "One possibility is that it was a target of natural selection for music or that it has evolved for some other function that just happens to be relevant for music processing," the authors write.

For the study, 120 infants listened to a variety of audio stimuli including classical music, rhythmic beats and speech. Their spontaneous movements were recorded by video and 3D motion-capture technology and compared across the different stimuli.

The asteroid 1999 RQ36 may be able to tell scientists how the solar system was born, and perhaps, shed light on how life began. The chunk of rock and dust, about 1,900 feet in diameter, also might hit us someday, according to NASA researchers studying the asteroid.

Asteroids are leftovers from the cloud of gas and dust – the solar nebula -- that collapsed to form our sun and the planets about 4.5 billion years ago. As such, they contain the original material from the solar nebula, which can tell us about the conditions of our solar system's birth.

In some asteroids, this material was altered by heat and chemical reactions, either because they collided with other asteroids, or because they grew so large that their interiors became molten.

A lack of free time is no longer a viable excuse for avoiding exercise, according to a new study in The Journal of Physiology.

Researchers studying interval training have found that it not only takes less time than what is typically recommended, but the regimen does not have to be overly intense to be effective in helping reduce the risk of such diseases at Type 2 diabetes.

The study adds to a growing body of research that has zeroed in on this particular style of exercise in which a person trains hard but for less time.

Birds communicate with their developing chicks before they hatch by leaving them messages in the egg, new research published in Science has found.

By changing conditions within the egg, canary mothers leave a message for their developing chicks about the life they will face after birth. In response, nestlings adjust the development of their begging behavior.

If chicks get a message that they will be reared by generous parents then they beg more vigorously for food after hatching. But chicks that are destined to be raised by meaner parents end up being much less demanding.