An international consortium of 35 labs led by University of Groningen Professor of Marine Biology Jeanine Olsen published the genome of the seagrass Zostera marina in the scientific journal Nature on 27 January. Seagrasses are the only flowering plants to have returned to the sea, arguably the most extreme adaptation a terrestrial (or even freshwater) species can undergo. They provide a unique opportunity to study the adaptations involved. The Zostera marina genome is an exceptional resource that supports a wide range of research themes, from the adaptation of marine ecosystems under climate warming and its role in carbon burial to unravelling the mechanisms of salinity tolerance that may further inform the assisted breeding of crop plants.

The human brain works by dividing labor. Although our thinking organ excels in displaying amazing flexibility and plasticity, typically different areas of the brain take over different tasks. While words and language are mainly being processed in the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is responsible for numerical reasoning.

According to previous findings, this division of labor originates from the fact that the first steps in the processing of letters and numbers are also located individually in the different hemispheres. But this is not the case, at least not when it comes to the visual processing of numbers. 

A study funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI), part of the National Institutes of Health, has shown that uncorrected farsightedness (hyperopia) in preschool children is associated with significantly worse performance on a test of early literacy.

The results of the Vision in Preschoolers-Hyperopia in Preschoolers (VIP-HIP) study, which compared 4- and 5-year-old children with uncorrected hyperopia to children with normal vision, found that children with moderate hyperopia (3 to 6 diopters) did significantly worse on the Test of Preschool Early Literacy (TOPEL) than their normal-vision peers. A diopter is the lens power needed to correct vision to normal. The higher the diopter, the worse the hyperopia.

Interventions intended to encourage green choices among individuals, including for recycling or energy use, would be better targeted at moments of major change in people's lives if they are to stick, according to a new study from University of Bath psychology researchers.

In their paper, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, behaviour change experts from the University's Department of Psychology suggest that life transitions, such as a house move or changing jobs, can provide a window of opportunity, during which time habits can be shifted. After this point habits become entrenched and far harder to change.

Dr. Sébastien Jacquemont, a geneticist at the University of Montreal, has correlated genetics to intelligence. "We have just discovered, for example, that a missing copy of a region in chromosome 16 results in a 25-point intelligence quotient (IQ) drop in carriers. Addition of a copy in the same genomic region results in an approximate 16-point drop. Strangely enough, even if carriers show much differentiated sets of symptoms - and sometimes no symptoms at all - the specific effect of these two mutations seems to remain the same."