Browse the latest news and discoveries relating to animal research at UBC.
News
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December 6, 2018
Industrial fisheries are starving seabirds all around the world
Industrial fisheries are starving seabirds like penguins and terns by competing for the same prey sources, new research from the French National Center for Scientific Research in Montpellier and the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia has found.
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December 4, 2018
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.
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November 27, 2018
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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November 7, 2018
Novel discovery could lead to new cancer, autoimmune disease therapy
International research project co-led by UBC Canada 150 Research Chair A new discovery by an international research team—co-led by UBC Canada 150 Research Chair Josef Penninger and Harvard Medical School neurobiologist Clifford Woolf—could have implications for therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases.
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October 29, 2018
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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October 11, 2018
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. But new findings from the University of British Columbia suggest that the effect of motherhood on the brain appears to last much longer after childbirth than previously believed.
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October 3, 2018
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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September 11, 2018
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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September 10, 2018
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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June 27, 2018
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.