Social play, a widespread phenomenon in mammals, is a multifunctional behavior, which can have many different roles according to species, sex, age, relationship quality between playmates, group membership, context, and habitat. Play joins and cuts across a variety of disciplines leading directly to inquiries relating to individual developmental changes and species adaptation, thus the importanc...

NOMENCLATURE The following nomenclature will be used in this article: Names of genes are written in italicized upper-case letters, e.g., ABI4.Names of proteins are written in non-italicized upper-case letters, e.g., ABI4.Names of mutants are written in italicized lower-case letters, e.g., abi4. The juvenile-to-adult and vegetative-to-reproductive phase transitions are major determinants of plan...

The foraging niche is characterized by the exploitation of nutrient-rich resources using complex extraction techniques that take a long time to acquire. This costly period of development is supported by intensive parental investment. Although human life history theory tends to characterize this investment in terms of food and care, ethnographic research on foraging skill transmission suggests t...

Orienting in large-scale space depends on the interaction of environmental experience and preconfigured, possibly innate, constructs. Place, head-direction, and grid cells in the hippocampal formation provide allocentric representations of space. Here we show how these cognitive representations emerge and develop as rat pups first begin to explore their environment. Directional, locational, and...

TERMINAL FLOWER is a key regulator of floral timing in Arabidopsis and other herbaceous species. A homolog of this gene, CsTFL, was isolated from the hybrid perennial tree crop Washington navel orange (Citrus sinensis L. Osbeck). The deduced amino acid sequence of CsTFL was 65% identical to the Arabidopsis TFL1 protein. Wild-type Arabidopsis plants ectopically expressing CsTFL showed late-flowe...

The development of flower buds and a sufficient fruit set are basic requirements for fruit growers to generate a marketable crop. However, fruit trees remain in a juvenile (nonflowering) phase for years, and after a transition period of getting reproductively competent they enter the adult phase of tree life. The reproductive phase is associated with the ability to alternate between the product...