iScience is a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal published by Cell Press covering research across life, physical, and earth sciences.
Ryuta Kuwamizu's team reports in iScience that young adults' pupils dilated while counting aloud in all three experiments. Silent counting always produced smaller pupil changes, and their direction depended on the task.
Reality
Kyoto University researchers tied owners' positive moods to time near their cats in a one-month study of 19 owners and 29 cats. All participants owned cats and the results are associations, so the study cannot show that closeness lifts mood.
Reality
Sled dogs have radius, ulna and tibia bones about 6% shorter than other canids after size adjustment, University of Haifa researchers report. The authors say the proportions could identify possible sled dogs where no sled equipment survives.
Reality
Tohoku University researchers found that stimulating the vagus nerve after each practice session gave mice stronger eye-movement learning on later days. The study adds brain blood vessels to the routes by which the stimulation might act, though so far that link rests only on a correlation.
Reality
Female gray tree frogs got slower and worse at picking the most attractive call when up to seven weaker rivals played, an iScience study of 60 frogs finds. Because the calls never overlapped, hearing problems cannot explain the decline, though nobody has yet tested whether it changes which males mate in a real chorus.
Reality
Australian Institute of Marine Science biologists re-identified 31 black teatfish by DNA after 24 years and estimate the species can live more than 120 years. Adults barely grow, so a teatfish's size reveals little about the age of an endangered animal still prized as a delicacy.
Reality
Female gray tree frogs got slower and worse at picking an attractive mating call as rival calls multiplied, a 60-frog lab study in iScience found. The authors trace the decline to how females weigh options, though its effect on which males mate in a wild chorus has not been tested.
Reality
Northwestern researchers found 35 young adults reacted 41 milliseconds faster to a visual cue while exhaling than while inhaling. That makes breath phase a source of variation in a standard clinical attention test, through a link the team cannot yet explain.
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A University of Otago team screened rivers, tap, bottled, tank and rainwater with a bioassay for the combined effect of estrogenic chemicals. Some samples showed strong activity and three showed none at all.
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Two Aedes species and a night-biting Culex tracked different chemistry on the same panel of people, so a repellent aimed at one cue is unlikely to protect equally well against all three disease vectors.
Reality