Recent research from Vidi researcher Josef Stuefer at the Radboud University Nijmegen reveals that plants have their own chat systems that they can use to warn each other. Therefore plants are not boring and passive organisms that just stand there waiting to be cut off or eaten up. Many plants form internal communications networks and are able to exchange information efficiently.

Many herbal plants such as strawberry, clover, reed and ground elder naturally form networks. Individual plants remain connected with each other for a certain period of time by means of runners. These connections enable the plants to share information with each other via internal channels. They are therefore very similar to computer networks. But what do plants want to chat to each other about?

Music training, with its pervasive effects on the nervous system’s ability to process sight and sound, may be more important for enhancing verbal communication skills than learning phonics, according to a new Northwestern University study.

Musicians use all of their senses to practice and perform a musical piece. They watch other musicians, read lips, and feel, hear and perform music, thus, engaging multi-sensory skills. As it turns out, the brain’s alteration from the multi-sensory process of music training enhances the same communication skills needed for speaking and reading, the study concludes.

What will we find in the way of planets similar to Earth as we keep expanding our ability to see into the universe?

No one is sure but a team of MIT, NASA, and Carnegie scientists wants to come up with the possibilities. So far they have created models for 14 different types of solid planets that might exist in our galaxy.

The 14 types have various compositions, and the team calculated how large each planet would be for a given mass. Some are pure water ice, carbon, iron, silicate, carbon monoxide, and silicon carbide; others are mixtures of these various compounds.

Why are some people prejudiced and others are not? The authors of a study in Psychological Science investigate how some individuals are able to avoid prejudicial biases despite the pervasive human tendency to favor one’s own group.

Robert Livingston of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Brian Drwecki of the University of Wisconsin conducted studies that examined white college students who harbored either some or no racial biases.

They found that only seven percent did not show any racial bias (as measured by implicit and explicit psychological tests), and that non-biased individuals differed from biased individuals in a fundamental way -- they were less likely to form negative affective associations in general.

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.