The way in which we experience music and speech differs from what has until now been believed. This is the conclusion of a study by researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, and the Oregon Health and Science University, USA. The results have been published in Science Advances, and may make it possible to design better cochlear implants.

The University of Cincinnati's Pankaj Desai, PhD, has received a $1.19 million grant from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to continue research into the use of a drug called letrozole to treat glioblastomas, the most deadly form of brain tumors.

Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital identified the mechanism by which Williams-Beuren Syndrome enhances the ability to discriminate between sounds as interneuron hyperexcitability in the auditory cortex.

In addition to enabling the manufacture of platelets on demand, the finding could help doctors better treat both cancer and thrombocytopenia, a clotting disorder that often strikes newborns in intensive care.

In 2012, a crop of California's most prized ornamental trees was overrun by an invisible invader. The growing shoots of coral beans — the official city tree of Los Angeles — began wilting and falling away, revealing stems that had been hollowed out from the inside by the caterpillars of Erythrina stem borer moths. A new study published this Wednesday in the Journal of Applied Entomology reveals the culprit's origin through a DNA analysis of insects provided by the late Dan Lindsley, formerly a retired UC San Diego professor of genetics.

African Plant Nutrition Institute (APNI), Fertilizer Canada, and OCP Africa have recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to collaborate on agriculture development programmes that target sub-Saharan rural farmers, particularly women and youth. The planned interventions will see a marked improvement in food-security and livelihoods for smallholder farmers through joint programming, shared learning, and resource mobilisation.

An international team of scientists from the UK, Spain, Denmark and Russia (including researchers from the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience) conducted an experiment demonstrating that people automatically integrate extralinguistic information into grammatical processing during verbal communication. The study findings were published in the Scientific Reports Journal.