V Vol 45 ol 459 9| |4 June 2009 4 June 2009 RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS Pretty please Anim. Behav. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav. 2009.03.11 (2009) Many young animals beg for food from their elders. But, eventually, the pleading stops or the charity dries up. Joah Madden, at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his team looked to find the biological triggers that put an end to begging behaviour by studying free- ranging meerkats (Suricata suricatta) of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa over an 18-month period. The group analysed the begging calls of meerkat pups aged between 40 and 60 days — the peak of their begging behaviour — and compared them with the calls of the same individuals aged 100–120 days. Experimental playback to adults revealed that lower-pitched juvenile calls reaped fewer rewards than the pleading of pups. EVOLUTION researchers identified more than 3,000 GENETICS galaxies that formed up to about 12 billion Carnivore claim quashed Setting the biological clock years ago, when the Universe was only Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi:10.1073_ 1.7 billion years old. Many of these galaxies Nature Genet. 41, 724–728; 734–738; pnas.0901780106 (2009) were already big, suggesting that these earliest 729–733 (2009) A plausible hypothesis states that epochs of the Universe were very busy times, A series of studies has tracked possible socialization in mammals puts them under and probably responsible for the formation genetic influences on when a woman’s selective pressure to evolve larger brains. of a significant component of the Universe’s reproductive lifespan begins and ends....