You're thinking flying speed is just size and strength. Not so, say researchers from the University of Lund in Sweden. It's also a behavior issue and it's related to evolution.

Aerodynamic scaling rules that explain how flight varies according to weight and wing loading have been used to compare general speeds of a wide range of flyers, from the smallest insects to the largest aircraft but Thomas Alerstam, Mikael Rosen and colleagues analyzed the flight speeds of 138 bird species and overturn the general assumption that maximum flight speed of a species is solely determined by such rules.

Flight speed doesn’t just depend on mass and wing loading but also reflects the evolutionary lineage of the species in question.

The classic model of how brain cells communicate was put forth in 1943 by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, at the time the first digital computers were being envisaged, and the McCulloch-Pitts model suggested that brain cells communicate in a binary fashion, represented by a “1” for firing and a “0” for not firing, much as a modern computer functions.

While it is common to say that a mammalian brain functions like a computer, this is a somewhat faulty idea, in part because the observation from the Traub lab suggests that gap junctions cause “short circuiting” as part of the brain’s normal functions. A real computer could not function if it short circuited.

Researchers isolated bisdemethoxycurcumin, the active ingredient of curcuminoids – a natural substance found in turmeric root – that may help boost the immune system in clearing amyloid beta, a peptide that forms the plaques found in Alzheimer’s disease.

Using blood samples from Alzheimer’s disease patients, researchers found that bisdemethoxycurcumin boosted immune cells called macrophages to clear amyloid beta. In addition, researchers identified the immune genes associated with this activity.

The study provides more insight into the role of the immune system in Alzheimer’s disease and points to a new treatment approach. Researchers say that it may be possible to test a patient’s immune response with a blood sample in order to individualize treatment.

Your ability to listen to a phone message in one ear while a friend is talking into your other ear—and comprehend what both are saying—is an important communication skill that’s heavily influenced by your genes, say researchers of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), one of the National Institutes of Health.

The finding may help researchers better understand a broad and complex group of disorders—called auditory processing disorders (APDs)—in which individuals with otherwise normal hearing ability have trouble making sense of the sounds around them.

“Our auditory system doesn’t end with our ears,” says James F. Battey, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., director of the NIDCD. “It also includes the part of our brain that helps us interpret the sounds we hear.

Early man was on a constant quest for food. The demands of nourishment and conserving as much energy as possible may even have changed the course of evolution.

While no one has an authoritative answer, anthropologists have long theorized that early humans began walking on two legs as a way to reduce locomotor energy costs.

In the first study to fully examine this theory among humans and adult chimpanzees, researchers have found that human walking is around 75 percent less costly, in terms of energy and caloric expenditure, than quadrupedal and bipedal walking in chimpanzees.

In the 40 years that humans have been traveling into space, the suits they wear have changed very little. The bulky, gas-pressurized outfits give astronauts a bubble of protection, but their significant mass and the pressure itself severely limit mobility.

Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, wants to change that.

Newman is working on a sleek, advanced suit designed to allow superior mobility when humans eventually reach Mars or return to the moon.