Self-organizing social behaviour in the so-called plant-animal, a 'solar-powered' species of marine flat worm that gains all its energy from the algae within its own body, has been demonstrated by researchers from the University of Bristol, UK.

Professor Nigel Franks in the School of Biological Sciences and colleagues, especially Dr Alan Worley, formerly of the School of Physics, made direct comparisons between videos of the real worms and computer simulations of virtual worms with different patterns of behaviour. This showed that individual plant-animal worms (Symsagittifera roscoffensis) interact with one another to coordinate their movements.

Microbirthing, which involves taking a swab from the mother's vagina and wiping this over the baby's mouth, eyes, face and skin shortly after birth by Cesarean section, is a growing fad, but there is no evidence this 'vaginal seeding' does anything positive, according to an editorial in the BMJ. Around one in four babies are born via caesarean section in the UK. 

Fish and other important resources are moving toward the Earth's poles as the climate warms, and wealth is moving with them, according to a new paper by scientists at Rutgers, Princeton, Yale, and Arizona State universities.

Climate change is forcing some species of migrating fish to shift their range toward the poles, which means big changes for people whose livelihoods depend on those fish.

APEX, the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment telescope, is located at 5100 metres above sea level on the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile's Atacama region. The ATLASGAL survey took advantage of the unique characteristics of the telescope to provide a detailed view of the distribution of cold dense gas along the plane of the Milky Way galaxy [1]. The new image includes most of the regions of star formation in the southern Milky Way [2].

A new editorial warns that newborns may develop infections from exposure to vaginal bacteria, and suggest that encouraging breast feeding and avoiding unnecessary antibiotics may be a much better idea for creating a healthy immune system in infants.

The term vaginal seeding, also called microbirthing, describes wiping babies with vaginal fluid after they have been born by Cesarean. The belief is that this boosts poorly-defined beneficial gut microbes that keep our immune systems healthy and so may reduce the risk of developing conditions such as asthma, food allergies, and hay fever in later life.

WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb. 23, 2016 -- Musical styles and genres differ around the world, but the emotional power of music is universally felt. To understand this evocative force, researchers in many fields, including information science, neural perception, and signal processing, investigate music's underlying structure, examining features such as the tone, timbre, and auditory and rhythmic features of a piece.

Now a team of Japanese scientists from the University of Tokyo has developed a new approach to analyzing musical structure. The new method overcomes many of the limits of previous tools. The researchers publish their results in the journal Chaos, from AIP Publishing.