Early flowering, early fruiting: Anecdotal evidence of climate change is popping up as quickly as spring crocuses, but is it coincidence or confirmation that plants’ timing is shifting in response to warming temperatures?

By Shawn Hayward

Whether it is dancing or just tapping one foot to the beat, we all experience how auditory signals like music can induce movement. Now new research suggests that motor signals in the brain actually sharpen sound perception, and this effect is increased when we move in rhythm with the sound.

Muscle malfunctions may be as simple as a slight strain after exercise or as serious as heart failure and muscular dystrophy. A new technique developed at McGill now makes it possible to look much more closely at how sarcomeres, the basic building blocks within all skeletal and cardiac muscles, work together. It’s a discovery that should advance research into a wide range of muscle malfunctions.

Talk about finicky work

Too much fear can be dangerous for species’ survival. In fact, fear alone, even in the absence of a live predator, can lead to species’ extinction if the population size is small enough suggests a recent study from McGill and Guelph universities. To read: “How fear alone can cause animal extinction”

Before they have the wing span to actually permit them to fly, young guillemots (also known as murres) leap hundreds of metres off towering cliffs and flutter down towards the sea, guided by their fathers. Scientists have long wondered why these tiny chicks make this remarkable leap, hoping to avoid the rocks below them, in what seems an unlikely survival strategy for a species.

One of the big mysteries in the scientific world is how the ice sheets of Antarctica formed so rapidly about 34 million years ago, at the boundary between the Eocene and Oligocene epochs.

There are 2 competing theories:

The first explanation is based on global climate change: Scientists have shown that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels declined steadily since the beginning of the Cenozoic Era, 66 million years ago. Once CO2 dropped below a critical threshold, cooler global temperatures allowed the ice sheets of Antarctica to form.

Researchers have linked a debilitating neurological disease in children to mutations in a gene that regulates neuronal development through control of protein movement within neuronal cells.