When a surface is getting wet, also the composition of the liquid plays a role in the wetting process. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) found that phase separation within the wetting liquid directly affects the dynamics of spreading. Their findings may be important in various applications, including tissue engineering, biology and semiconductor manufacturing. The study was recently published in the scientific journal PNAS.

The stronger and more aggressive sex dominates the weaker sex. This simplistic view of male-female dominance relationships is common but falls short of the complexity of how dominance hierarchies are established in animal societies. A team of scientists with participation of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin (Leibniz-IZW) now compared intersexual dominance hierarchies of nine group-living mammals using a set of standardised methods and behaviours. They found that the species ranged from being strictly male to strictly female dominated, and that hierarchies were robust with respect to the method applied to construct them. They also found that in female-dominated societies, animals mostly relied on submissive signals and gestures to establish and maintain dominance, whereas in male-dominated societies, they mostly used aggressive behaviours. The results were published in the open access journal “Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution”.

Today, the first biological and biomedical “data” journal GigaScience celebrates its 10th year of being at the forefront of open scientific publishing. GigaScience was launched on July 12, 2012, at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference in Long Beach, CA; and the journal’s team is currently at the 30th ISMB Conference in Madison, WI, to host a celebration of their first decade alongside the publication of an Editorial detailing their achievements in promoting open science and goals for the future. With the recent release of UNESCO’s recommendations for open science, GigaScience takes its 10th birthday as an opportunity to look back at what the journal has achieved among these recommendations and where the journal needs to direct its energies in the future. The editorial published today is part of a special series of commentaries that cover changes in a variety of scientific areas over the last decade, these include changes in open data, standards, conservation, imaging, women-in-science, and more.

In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, MIT Sloan School of Management Prof. Andrew W. Lo and Hebrew University School of Business Prof. Moshe Levy have found strong support for Hamilton's rule in an experiment involving monetary transactions among human subjects with varying degrees of genetic relatedness.