articles

Nearly 15 percent of all chewing gum varieties sold promise to provide health-enhancing supplements to users, so Penn State researchers studied whether two vitamin-supplemented products were effective at delivering vitamins to the body. Their results validate the concept of gum as an effective delivery system for at least some vitamins.

Just like humans, young songbirds are thought to learn their vocalizations by listening to adults — a process that has been studied in the laboratory but never experimentally in the wild, until now.

Spring in America’s heartland is often wet. That makes its soil too soft for planting. One solution to that issue is tile drainage. Growers insert a series of pipes (drain tiles) under their fields, which drains water from the soil into nearby streams and lakes. 

Heat and lots of rainfall, thanks in part to Hurricane Florence, were the key factors in last month’s ranking as fourth hottest and third wettest September on record for the contiguous United States.

Why share food with non-family members when there is no immediate gain? An international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, conducted observations of natural food sharing behavior of the chimpanzees of the Taï National Park, Ivory Coast. They found that chimpanzees who possess large, desirable food items, like meat, honey or large fruit share food with their friends, and that neither high dominance status nor harassment by beggars influenced possessors’ decisions to share.