People across the South West are being urged to show their support for World Cancer Day today (February 4) as Cancer Research UK releases new figures revealing that cancer death rates in the region have fallen by 9 per cent over the last 10 years.
The charity is encouraging everyone in the region to wear a Unity Band or make a donation to demonstrate their support for people affected by cancer.
The Unity Band is made of two parts, knotted together, to represent strength in unity. They are available for a suggested donation of £2 from all Cancer Research UK shops and at www....
A leading behavioural ecologist from the University of Exeter has become the 1,000th researcher to receive a national fellowship for her pioneering research contributions in the field of social evolution and animal behaviour.
Dr Lauren Brent has received a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to support her research on social dynamics and the evolution of cooperation in animal societies.
Her proposed research will examine the exchange of cooperative behaviours between free-living rhesus macaque monkeys with the aim of uncovering the systems that allow the persistence of...
A new clinical imaging method developed in collaboration with a University of Exeter academic may enable doctors to tackle one of the main killers of patients with weakened immune systems sooner and more effectively.
The spores of the fungus Aspergillus fumigatus are tiny, everywhere in the air and breathed in by humans every day.
They do not usually cause a problem for healthy people as their immune systems kill the spores before they can grow and infect the body. But in patients with an immune system weakened by leukaemia or bone marrow transplantation, the fungus faces...
New research has revealed how disease-associated changes in two interlinked networks within the brain may play a key role in the development of the symptoms of dementia.
The University of Exeter Medical School led two studies, each of which moves us a step closer to understanding the onset of dementia, and potentially to paving the way for future therapies. Both studies, part-funded by Alzheimer’s Research UK, are published in the Journal of Neuroscience and involved collaboration with the University of Bristol.
Both studies shed light on how two parts of the brain’s ‘GPS’...
In January, the most depressing month of the year, researchers are urging people to take up free therapy courses in a bid to help them find a definitive answer to what works best in online treatment for depression.
It has long been known that online cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) can be effective in treating depression – but scientists do not know which aspects work best. Now researchers at the University of Exeter are using Blue Monday, which has been labelled the most depressing day of the year, to raise awareness of a trial which will provide free online CBT for people with...
Female burying beetles are more attracted to small partners because they are less likely to get into fights, a study by researchers at the University of Exeter has found.
The research published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology found that while small male beetles were more successful at attracting female mates to the breeding ground of an animal carcass than larger males, they didn’t make better parents.
In the first study of its kind carried out in the wild, researchers tested whether individual male burying beetles -- known for being exceptionally good parents in the...
The University of Exeter and the Centre for the Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Sciences (Cefas) are leading on a £1.97M BBSRC-Newton Fund project to develop and apply new molecular biology techniques to reduce the impact of major diseases in aquaculture for the improvement of the livelihood of small-scale farmers in India, Bangladesh and Malawi.
Aquaculture contributes significantly to global food security and poverty reduction. In Bangladesh and India the shrimp fishing industry sustains the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of poor people. Fish farming too is...
People have evolved to have subconscious urges to over-eat, and limited ability to avoid becoming obese, especially in winter, a University of Exeter study has found.
There is not yet an evolutionary mechanism to help us overcome the lure of sweet, fatty and unhealthy food and avoid becoming overweight for understandable and sensible reasons, according to researchers.
This is because in our past being overweight has not posed a significant threat to survival compared to the dangers of being underweight. The urge to maintain body fat is even stronger in winter when food in...
Scientists have been given an extraordinary glimpse into how wild New Caledonian crows make and use ‘hooked stick tools’ to hunt for insect prey.
Dr Jolyon Troscianko, from the University of Exeter, and Dr Christian Rutz, from the University of St Andrews, have captured first video recordings documenting how these tropical corvids fashion these particularly complex tools in the wild.
The pair developed tiny video ‘spy-cameras’ which were attached to the crows, to observe their natural foraging behaviour.
They discovered two instances of hooked stick tool making on...
Six University of Exeter academics appear on a list of the world’s most influential scientific minds that is published this week.
Inclusion on the authoritative Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researchers list for 2015 puts the academics, who are working across the natural, biomedical and social sciences, in the top one per cent of researchers globally. Three are producing world class research on climate change and three in fields related to medicine.
Two academics from Mathematics – Peter Cox and Pierre Friedlingstein -- are listed under GeoSciences, along with Neil Adger...
