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(Phys.org)—An international team of researchers has found that deep voices in primates, including humans, might have evolved more as a means to intimidate rivals than to attract females for mating. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the team describes three separate experiments they carried out to test their ideas on the reasons for large differences in the vocal frequency range of male primates.

(Phys.org)—A small team of researchers from the University of Maine, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Perdue University has found that copepods that eat a certain type of toxic algae react to it by engaging in unusual behavior that ultimately puts them at risk from other predators. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Rachel Lasley-Rasher, Kathryn Nagel, Aakanksha Angra and Jeannette Yen describe a study they carried out of copepods called Temora longicornis off the eastern coast of the U.S.

The Sapayoa, a rainforest bird from Central and South America, is an evolutionary enigma—genetic analysis shows that its closest relatives are bird species living across the ocean in Asia and Africa. Now, new research in The Auk: Ornithological Advances demonstrates for the first time that its natural history links it to its evolutionary relatives thousands of miles away.

Multiple dispersals of penguins reached Australia after the continent split from Antarctica, including ‘giant penguins’ that may have lived there after they went extinct elsewhere, according to a study published April 26, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Travis Park from Monash University, Australia, and colleagues.

Dissection might prove unnecessary when identifying new molluscs after scientists Corey Whisson, Western Australian Museum, and Dr Abraham Breure, Naturalis Biodiversity Centre, the Netherlands, and Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Belgium, described a previously unknown land snail based on its genitalia, yet without damaging the specimen in the slightest.

Thin films of crystalline materials called perovskites provide a promising new way of making inexpensive and efficient solar cells. Now, an international team of researchers has shown a way of flipping a chemical switch that converts one type of perovskite into another—a type that has better thermal stability and is a better light absorber.

A team of researchers led by scientists from the American Museum of Natural History has found that catsharks are not only able to see the bright green biofluorescence they produce, but that they increase contrast of their glowing pattern when deep underwater. The study, conducted with a custom-built “shark-eye” camera that simulates how the shark sees underwater, shows that fluorescence makes catsharks more visible to neighbors of the same species at the depths that they live and may aid in communication between one another

MIT researchers have devised a new set of proteins that can be customized to bind arbitrary RNA sequences, making it possible to image RNA inside living cells, monitor what a particular RNA strand is doing, and even control RNA activity.

A new reef system has been found at the mouth of the Amazon River, the largest river by discharge of water in the world. As large rivers empty into the world’s oceans in areas known as plumes, they typically create gaps in the reef distribution along the tropical shelves—something that makes finding a reef in the Amazon plume an unexpected discovery.

A recent survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that 74 percent of Americans think manners and behavior have deteriorated in the United States over the past several decades. A large majority of Americans believe that politicians should be held to a higher standard than the general public, but few think they are living up to that expectation.