*Yes, yes, we know: Insects.

Read more about this study here.

A new study, led by Julio Martinez-Trujillo, a cognitive neurophysiology specialist from McGill University, has found evidence of multiple spotlights.

The team published their findings in Neuron. (And, yes, that’s McGill’s Redmen football team on the cover. Sports is a good example of cognitive multi-tasking.) The team recorded the activity of single neurons in the brains of two monkeys while the animals concentrated on two objects that circumvented a third “distracter” object. The neural recordings showed that attention can in fact, be split into two “spotlights” corresponding to the relevant objects and excluding the in-between distracter.

“One implication of these findings is that our brain has evolved to attend to more than one object in parallel, and therefore to multi-task,” says Martinez-Trujillo. “Though there are limits, our brains have this ability.”

Read more about the study here.

“When a glacier starts to retreat, at some point you reach a plateau and from this point onwards, you have a decrease in the discharge of melt water from the glacier,” explained Baraer at a December meeting of the American Geophysical Union. He collaborated on the study with Jeffrey McKenzie, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Bryan Mark of Ohio State University.

“For almost all the watersheds we have studied,” added Baraer, “we have good evidence that we have passed peak water.” As a result, millions of people in Northern Peru may soon face serious shortages of electricity, irrigation and drinking water.

Read more about this study.

We think there’s some legal requirement that all blogs make at least one passing reference to singing sensation du jour Lana Del Rey. (At the very least, it’ll juke our stats, as they’d say on The Wire*.) So here goes: Could it be that Ms. Del Rey’s viral hit song “Video Games” is actually about Phylo, the online game that lets casual players contribute to scientific research? You know, by arranging multiple sequences of coloured blocks that represent human DNA? And thereby helping scientists gain new insight into a variety of genetically based diseases? Probably not, but last year 17,000 registered users got on the Phylo bandwagon. And there’s plenty room for more. “It’s guilt-free playing,” says Mathieu Blanchette, who designed the game with professor Jérôme Waldispuhl of the McGill School of Computer Science. “Now you can tell yourself it’s not just wasted time.”

So, in the name of science, go play a video game.

*Gratuitous references to The Wire: Also good for driving up Web traffic.

Now, after five years of research, Abouheif and his team have figured out this mystery: It turns out that any old Pheidole ant contains the dormant genetic potential to develop into a supersoldier—-and, even more exciting, the researchers can induce a regular ant into unleashing its inner supersoldier by applying juvenile hormone to the ant larvae at critical stages in their development. The team, led by PhD student Rajee Rajakumar (and including collaborators at the University of Arizona) published a paper in the latest edition of Science. The potentially revolutionary findings show that dormant genetic potential can be locked in place for a very long time.

“The kind of environmental stressors that evoke this dormant potential are there all the time – so when the need arises natural selection can take hold of the potential and actualize it,” says Abouheif, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Evolutionary Development Biology. “So what we’re showing is that environmental stress is important for evolution because it can facilitate the development of novel phenotypes. Anytime you have a mismatch between the normal environment of the organism and its genetic potential you can release them – and these things can be locked in place for 30-65 million years.”

The research was funded by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Research Chair in Evolutionary Development Biology, the National Sciences Foundation, Konrad Lorenz Institute Fellowship.

$3 million will endow the McGill Trottier Office for Science and Society to continue its role as a go-to source for reliable and unbiased science information. (The OSS is headed by Joe “Dr. Joe” Schwarcz, a tireless debunker of modern day snake oil peddlers.) The other $2.5 million makes permanent the popular Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium Series and Mini-Science Series, which helps bring relevant scientific debate into the public arena. This year’s topic was at the Symposium was “Alternative Medicine Under the Microscope.”

After completing his Bachelor and Masters degrees here at McGill, Mr. Trottier went about co-founding Matrox Electronics Systems Ltd. In 2000, he donated $10-million to help build the Lorne M. Trottier Building (home to Electrical and Computer Engineering and the School of Computer Science) and followed that up in 2006 with a $12-million gift to create the Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics and Cosmology and the Lorne Trottier Chair in Aerospace Engineering (currently held, respectively, by Vicky Kaspi and Stephen Yue). He was awarded an honourary Doctor of Science by McGill in 2006, and became a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2007.

The most recent donation positions Mr. Trottier as the largest donor to the Faculty of Science in McGill history. It also positions his name on a whole lot of great stuff happening around here. So, it’s a pretty sure bet that if a new condition is discovered that leads to increased amounts of generosity and dedication towards science and/or one’s alma mater, “Trottier’s Syndrome” will be at the top of the naming list.

A study by McGill biology doctoral student Pradeep Pillai has outlined a unified, spatially-based understanding of biodiversity that is centered around the concept of “food webs.” More than just a simple statement about the food chain, this concept shows how a generalist feeder influences, and is influenced by, the ecosystems that it occupies at any given time. The study was co-authored by professors Andrew Gonzalez and Michel Loreau, also of McGill’s Department of Biology. The study was published in PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America).

A key difference between a specialist feeder, like a sloth (mostly cecropia leaves), and a generalist, like a raccoon (whatever’s inside that garbage can you didn’t properly shut), is that the latter doesn’t need as much total territory to forage, but moves around a lot more and changes its eating habits as it goes. This means that its “food web” is dynamic, which has implications on how we pin down the effects of habitat loss on a species that won’t stay put. Oh, and human beings are generalists, too, so the next time your favourite bistro across town gets bulldozed to make way for a freeway, remember that you’re not alone.

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