Animal Research
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Dairy calves’ personalities predict their ability to cope with stress
A UBC study published earlier this year found that dairy calves have distinct personality traits from a very young age. Now researchers have followed up that study by examining those same calves at four months of age, to find out how their personality traits govern their reactions to real-world situations.
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Newly discovered wasp turns social spiders into zombies
It sounds like the plot of the world’s tiniest horror movie: deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a newly discovered species of wasp transforms a “social” spider into a zombie-like drone that abandons its colony to do the wasp’s bidding.
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Novel discovery could lead to new cancer, autoimmune disease therapy
A new discovery by an international research team—co-led by UBC Canada 150 Research Chair Josef Penninger and Harvard Medical School Professor Clifford Woolf—could have implications for therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases.
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Casino lights and sounds encourage risky decision-making
The blinking lights and exciting jingles in casinos may encourage risky decision-making and potentially promote problem gambling behaviour, suggests new research from the University of British Columbia.
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Previous motherhood could affect hormone therapy’s ability to prevent memory loss
Researchers have established that the foggy feeling and forgetfulness that many new mothers report during and after pregnancy—known as “mom brain”— is real.
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Lowering levels of mutant protein that causes Huntington disease can restore cognitive function in mice
New research from the University of British Columbia suggests that reducing mutated Huntington disease protein in the brain can restore cognitive and psychiatric impairments in mice.
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Climate change fuels accumulation of pollutants in Chinook salmon, killer whales
University of British Columbia researchers studying the marine food web of the Northeast Pacific Ocean have found that the exposure and accumulation of chemical pollutants, such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and organic mercury, will be exacerbated under climate change.
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Global warming pushing alpine species higher and higher
For every one-degree-Celsius increase in temperature, mountaintop species shift upslope 100 metres, shrinking their inhabited area and resulting in dramatic population declines, new research by University of British Columbia zoologists has found.
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As penguins dive, their location data takes flight
Data sent from penguins to space and back to UBC could help researchers determine why the species’ breeding population fluctuates so dramatically.
