News by Subject Policy & Ethics

Before humans can benefit from new drug therapies and nutritional additives, scientists test their safety and efficacy in animals, typically mice and rats. But, as much as they've done for biomedical research, rodents aren't always the best research model for studies on neonatal brain development and nutrition. That's where pigs can play an important role.

A new material called "Digory" has been developed, which can be processed in 3D printers and is extremely similar to ivory. It can be used to restore old ivory artefacts.

Between 2018 and 2020, 1,4 million EU citizens signed the petition 'End the Cage Age', with the aim of ending cage housing for farm animals in Europe. In response to this citizens initiative, the European Parliament requested a study by Utrecht University researchers on the possibilities to end cage housing. On 13 April, the scientists will present their report 'End the Cage Age - Looking for Alternatives' to the European Parliament.

For nearly a decade, scientists have relied on an MRI-based map, or atlas, of the pig brain - developed at the University of Illinois using 4-week-old pigs - to understand where and how nutrients and other interventions affect the developing brain. Now, Illinois scientists have updated that atlas, increasing its resolution by a factor of four, and they have also added a new atlas for adolescent 12-week-old pigs.

For the sake of marine life, international collaboration is required to reduce undersea sounds.

New study reveals: fireflies produce strong ultrasonic sounds that might deter bats, potentially serving as a kind of 'musical armor' against these predators.

The risk is low that scientists could pass coronavirus to North American bats during winter research, according to a new study led by the U.S. Geological Survey.

A paper published in Nature on March 31 by Matthew Panichello, a postdoctoral research associate at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and Timothy Buschman, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton, found that attention and working memory share the same neural mechanisms. Importantly, their work also reveals how neural representations of memories are transformed as they direct behavior.