Intrinsic antioxidant defences are important for neuronal longevity. We show that synaptic activity, acting via NMDA receptor (NMDAR) signaling, boosts antioxidant defences through changes to the thioredoxin-peroxiredoxin system. Synaptic activity enhances thioredoxin activity, facilitates the reduction of overoxidized peroxiredoxins, and promotes resistance to oxidative stress. Resistance is m...

Interspecific interactions depend not only on the population densities of the interacting species, but on their phenotypes as well. Phenotypic variation can be plastic or heritable and both mechanisms can drive phenotypic change at rates comparable to or faster than those of ecological dynamics (e.g. changes in population abundances or spatial distributions). In this study, we compare the effec...

The Win32 platform has long been the whipping boy of memory corruption attacks and malware, which has forced Microsoft into implementing aggressive anti-exploitation mechanisms into their newer Operating Systems. Apple's Mac OS X (Leopard) has had a much smoother run, both in the media, and in terms of high profile attacks and the reason for this is less clear. In light of Apple's increased mar...

Sociality increases exposure to pathogens. Therefore, social insects have developed a wide range of behavioural defences, known as 'social immunity'. However, the benefits of these behaviours in terms of colony survival have been scarcely investigated. We tested the survival advantage of prophylaxis, i.e. corpse removal, in ants. Over 50 days, we compared the survival of ants in colonies that w...

Are companies, churches, and states genuine agents? Or are they just collections of individual agents that give a misleading impression of unity? This question is important, since the answer dictates how we should explain the behaviour of these entities and whether we should treat them as responsible and accountable on the model of individual agents. Group Agency offers a new approach to that q...

Understanding emotional disorders requires understanding the evolutionary origins and functions of normal emotions. They are special states, shaped by natural selection to adjust various aspects of the organism in ways that have tended to give a selective advantage in the face of the adaptive challenges characteristic of a particular kind of situation. They are designed to maximize reproductive...

Herbivores have been hypothesized to adapt locally to variation in plant defences and such adaptation could facilitate novel associations in the context of biological invasions. Here, we show that in the native range of the viburnum leaf beetle (VLB, Pyrrhalta viburni), two populations of geographically isolated hosts-Viburnum opulus and Viburnum tinus-have divergent defences against VLB ovipos...

Avian brood parasites reduce the reproductive output of their hosts and thereby select for defence mechanisms such as ejection of parasitic eggs. Such defence mechanisms simultaneously select for counter-defences in brood parasites, causing a coevolutionary arms race. Although coevolutionary models assume that defences and counter-defences are genetically influenced, this has never been demonst...