New beginning seen for ants

Follow the family tree for all modern-day ant species, and it will lead you back 115 million to 135 million years before you come to the most recent common ancestor, say researchers at UC Davis, the California Academy of Sciences and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

Previous estimates, based on DNA differences, had placed the divergence among ants even earlier, during the Jurassic period that dates back 140 million to 200 million years ago.

This is just one of the findings of the research team, which recently assembled the largest ever molecular data set on the evolutionary history of ants. The findings of their study appeared last week online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.

"Ants are among the most successful of all insects," said Philip Ward, a professor of entomology at UC Davis and co-author of the study. "Because of that, we would like to understand how and when they evolved the characteristics that led to their dominance."

-- Pat Bailey

Experts explore expertise

A UC Davis neuroscience team has found that when people become experts in recognizing a visual object, they use the part of the brain that increases the amount of information that you can keep in mind at a given time.

The more expertise a person has, the more activity is found in that part of the brain, the part that looks for patterns and rules, in a region of the frontal lobe, report UC Davis graduate students Christopher Moore and Michael Cohen and associate professor of psychology Charan Ranganath in the Oct. 25 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

The finding has implications for elderly people, as well as people with an inability to activate the frontal lobe, such as those with heart disease and hardened arteries. "We think memory-skills training can improve the ability to activate this brain area," Ranganath said.

-- Susanne Rockwell

Psychologist aids gay union ruling

UC Davis research on gay families was used in the New Jersey Supreme Court's Oct. 25 ruling that same-sex couples must be afforded equal statutory rights and opportunities as those of heterosexuals.

In her opinion, Chief Justice Deborah Poritz referenced an article by UC Davis psychology professor Gregory Herek, an authority on prejudice against gay men and women. The article provided a scientific foundation to Poritz's opinion that same-sex families provide as stable a setting for child-rearing as heterosexual couples.

Published in the September issue of American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, Herek's article reviewed recent behavioral and social science studies on same-sex couples to assess the validity of the many assumed facts within the national debate. Regardless of whether children are raised in heterosexual or homosexual households, researchers have not found significant differences in their mental health or social adjustment, Herek reported.

Furthermore, he said a lack of full marriage rights in a society hinders a couple's ability to maintain a stable family environment.

-- Susanne Rockwell