Energy requirements: Brain tissue requires a lot of energy. Therefore, the organism must be able to provide this energy to support a larger brain.

Research findings: The study shows that body temperature has a significant influence on brain size in all vertebrates. The size of offspring also influences brain size in adulthood, as large brains in young animals incur high energy costs.

Evolutionary development: A constant body temperature enabled the growth of larger brains and opened up new evolutionary possibilities.

Wayne State University recently received a $2.3 million NIH award that will focus on finding new therapeutic strategies to fight infection and preserve vision caused by microbial keratitis, an infection of the cornea.

Myths about how the Black Death travelled quickly across Asia, ravaging Silk Route communities, date back to a single fourteenth-century source, experts have found.

Zoos and private collections teach, inspire, and connect people to animals they may never encounter in the wild. And, in some cases, those animals represent valuable ‘assurance populations’ — essentially, backups that could be used to revive critically endangered populations in their native ranges. But new research from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Morfeld Research & Conservation shows American giraffe collections have been hybridized across species, sharply reducing their conservation value.