Washington, March 24: An international team of researchers has found the earliest physical evidence for domesticated maize in Mexico, dating back to at least 8,700 calendar years ago, which is 1,500 years earlier than previously documented.

According to the researchers, the maize was probably domesticated by indigenous peoples in the lowland areas of southwestern Mexico, not the highland areas.

Washington, March 24: Researchers have gathered evidence of early human experiments with agriculture in dog and pig bones, as well as bones of other animals, from an archaeological site in a region of northwest China.

The bones come from a Neolithic site known as Dadiwan, in China’s western Loess Plateau, excavated first by a Chinese team in the late 70s and early 80s, and in 2006 by a team from the University of California, Davis, and Lanzhou University in China.

Washington, Mar 24: Feeling scared or amorous can greatly change the way people make decisions, claims a new study.

According to Vladas Griskevicius, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota''s Carlson School of Management, everyday people are confronted with innumerable pieces of information and hundreds of decisions.

Unsurprisingly, people often process each piece of information deeply, instead relying on quick mental shortcuts to guide their behaviors.

London, March 23: A compound used by TV show detectives to make blood glow, known as luminol, is now being used by scientists to highlight the sites where the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that injected luminol glows blue at sites of active immune inflammation in living mice.

The researchers say that this glow can be detected from outside the mice with the aid of scientific cameras.

Washington, March 21: Insects like honeybees and bumblebees prefer the shortest distance when they have to fly from one flower to another, according to an American study.

S. Alan Walters of Southern Illinois University and Jonathan R. Schultheis of North Carolina State University came to this conclusion after studying their pollinator movements down and across rows in watermelon, by tracking pollen flow.

London, March 19: Johns Hopkins engineers say that they have developed a new lab-on-a-chip that can lead to better cancer therapies.

The researchers say that their invention may help figure out how cancer cells break free from neighbouring tissue, an "escape" that can spread the disease to other parts of the body.