Do confident individuals generally work harder?

Birds do not work harder to breathe.

An efficient one-way airflow system is essential for bird flight. Extracting more oxygen per breath than mammals, birds can meet the costly fuel demands of flight. However, despite the gains achieved by maximising the amount of oxygen passing through their lungs, the metabolic cost of breathing for birds could be high. Birds were thought to have to work against the weight of their flight muscle...

How Confident Do You Feel?

In this issue of Neuron, Fetsch et al. (2014) show that microstimulation of motion-sensitive neurons in the visual cortex (MT/MST) of primates mimics the addition of sensory information for which the stimulated neurons are selective. Such microstimulation increases the confidence that monkeys have in their decisions about motion direction.

DO HAPPY WORKERS WORK HARDER? The effect of job satisfaction on work performance

Opinions about the consequences of happiness on work differ. There is no research on the effects of life-satisfaction on productivity but there is a lot of research on the link between job satisfaction and work performance. This research shows modestly positive correlations with productivity, absenteeism and labour turnover. These correlations tend to be stronger among white collar workers. It ...

How to work smarter, not harder.

Diet, morphology and performance in two chameleon morphs: do harder bites equate with harder prey?

1 Applied Biodiversity Research Division, South African National Biodiversity Institute, Claremont, Cape Town, South Africa 2 Department of Biodiversity and Conservation Biology, University of the Western Cape, Bellville, South Africa 3 Département d’Ecologie et de Gestion de la Biodiversité, UMR 7179 C.N.R.S/M.N.H.N., Paris, France 4 Department of Biology, University of Antwerp, Antwerpen, Bel...