INDIANAPOLIS - If you really want a drink right now, the source of your craving may be a pea-sized structure deep inside the right side of your brain, according to scientists at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

Using two different kinds of advanced brain imaging techniques (PET and fMRI), the researchers compared the results of giving beer drinkers a taste of their favorite beer versus a sports drink. After tasting the beer the participants reported increased desire to drink beer, whereas the sports drink did not provoke as much desire for beer. The brain scans also showed that the beer flavor induced more activity in both frontal lobes and in the right ventral striatum of the subjects' brains than did the sports drink.

From natural ecosystems to farmers' fields, plants face a dilemma of energy use: outgrow and outcompete their neighbors for light, or defend themselves against insects and disease.

But what if you could grow a plant that does both at the same time?

A team of researchers at Michigan State University is the first to accomplish that feat, and the breakthrough could have fruitful implications for farmers trying to increase crop yields and feed the planet's growing population.

A cabbage looper caterpillar crawls on an Arabidopsis plant. Credit: Kurt Stepnitz

The first study to investigate how dog brains process speech shows that our best friends in the animal kingdom care about both what we say and how we say it. Dogs, like people, use the left hemisphere to process words, a right hemisphere brain region to process intonation, and praising activates dog's reward center only when both words and intonation match, according to a study in Science.

It is now possible for machines to learn how natural or artificial systems work by simply observing them, without being told what to look for, according to researchers at the University of Sheffield.

This could mean advances in the world of technology with machines able to predict, among other things, human behaviour.

The discovery takes inspiration from the work of pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, who proposed a test, which a machine could pass if it behaved indistinguishably from a human. In this test, an interrogator exchanges messages with two players in a different room: one human, the other a machine.

Do anti-vaccine people hang around with anti-vaccine people or did hanging around with them cause them to lose faith in science?

There are an alarming number of factors that all correlate with anti-vaccine sentiment; the types of food purchased, beliefs about science, beliefs about energy, and beliefs about politics. But did all of those happen, and the people who embraced them gravitated toward each other, or did the social circle create the issue?

Irvine, Calif., Aug. 29, 2016 - As a multiyear drought grinds on in the Southwestern United States, many wonder about the impact of global climate change on more frequent and longer dry spells. As humans emit more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, how will water supply for people, farms, and forests be affected?

A new study from the University of California, Irvine and the University of Washington shows that water conserved by plants under high CO2 conditions compensates for much of the effect of warmer temperatures, retaining more water on land than predicted in commonly used drought assessments.