New research suggests that higher late life cognitive reserve--an ability to offset the losses associated with age- and disease-related changes in the brain--may help prevent delirium.

In a study of 142 older surgical patients, greater participation in cognitive activities was linked with lower incidence and lower severity of delirium; however, higher literacy was not. Among individual leisure activities, reading books, using electronic mail, singing, and playing computer games were associated with lower dementia incidence and severity.

Clouds may have a net warming or cooling effect on climate, depending on their thickness and altitude. Artificially formed clouds called contrails form due to aircraft effluent. In a cloudless sky, contrails are thought to have minimal effect on climate. But what happens when the sky is already cloudy? In a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, scientists at ACES and colleagues from the UK show that contrails that are formed within existing high clouds increase the reflectivity of these clouds, i.e. their ability to reflect light. The researchers hope that their discovery offers important insights into the influence of aviation on climate.

The team, led by James Cook University's Associate Professor Eric Roberts, discovered the oldest known example of fungus gardens within fossil termite nests from the Great Rift Valley of Africa in 25 million year old sediments.

Fungus farming termite colonies cultivate fungi in gardens in subterranean nests or chambers, helping to convert plant material into a more easily digestible food source for the termites.

Assoc Prof Roberts said that scientists had previously used DNA from modern termites to estimate the origin of termite 'fungus farming' behavior back to at least 25 to 30 million years ago.

Every year as mosquito season arrives, so does West Nile virus, causing fever in thousands of people nationwide and life-threatening brain infections in an unlucky few. About half the people who survive that infection - West Nile encephalitis - are left with permanent neurological deficits such as memory loss.

New research shows that these long-term neurological problems may be due to the patient's own immune system destroying parts of their neurons, which suggests that intervening in the immune response may help prevent brain damage or help patients recover.

The study is published June 22 in Nature.

Researchers from Disney Research and Shanghai's Fudan University have used deep learning techniques to train computer software to recognize events in videos, even categories of events that the software has not previously seen.

Their approach uses both scene and object features from the video and enables associations between these visual elements and each type of event to be automatically determined and weighted by a machine-learning architecture known as a neural network.

Traditionally, the evolutionary development of an insect species has been explained by the notion that the female insect chooses her male partner based on size and other factors, so-called assortative mating. These mating patterns have also been believed to partially explain how the isolation between different species is maintained.

However, new research from Lund University in Sweden shows just the opposite: assortative mating breaks down the sexual barrier between species rather than preserves it, which could lead to species becoming extinct. This discovery can be of significance within nature and species conservation.