Speedy revelations: how alarm calls can convey rapid, reliable information about urgent danger.

In the perpetual struggle between high-speed predators and their prey, individuals need to react in the blink of an eye to avoid capture. Alarm calls that warn of danger therefore need to do so sufficiently rapidly that listeners can escape in time. Paradoxically, many species produce more elements in their alarm calls when signalling about more immediate danger, thereby increasing the reliability of transmission of critical information but taking longer to convey the urgent message.

Personal information about danger trumps social information from avian alarm calls.

Information about predators can mean the difference between life and death, but prey face the challenge of integrating personal information about predators with social information from the alarm calls of others. This challenge might even affect the structure of interspecific information networks: species vary in response to alarm calls, potentially because different foraging ecologies constrain the acquisition of personal information. However, the hypothesis that constrained personal information explains a greater response to alarm calls has not been experimentally tested.

Wild birds learn to eavesdrop on heterospecific alarm calls.

Many vertebrates gain critical information about danger by eavesdropping on other species' alarm calls [1], providing an excellent context in which to study information flow among species in animal communities [2-4]. A fundamental but unresolved question is how individuals recognize other species' alarm calls. Although individuals respond to heterospecific calls that are acoustically similar to their own, alarms vary greatly among species, and eavesdropping probably also requires learning [1].

Crying wolf to a predator: deceptive vocal mimicry by a bird protecting young.

Animals often mimic dangerous or toxic species to deter predators; however, mimicry of such species may not always be possible and mimicry of benign species seems unlikely to confer anti-predator benefits. We reveal a system in which a bird mimics the alarm calls of harmless species to fool a predator 40 times its size and protect its offspring against attack. Our experiments revealed that brown thornbills (Acanthiza pusilla) mimic a chorus of other species' aerial alarm calls, a cue of an Accipiter hawk in flight, when predators attack their nest.

Positionally controlled growth of cells using a cytophobic fluorinated polymer.

This paper presents a novel method for cell positioning on a substrate which combines the optical quality of glass and the cell-repelling property of fluoropolymers. The process employs plasma lithography, which utilizes the high-resolution patterning of photolithography along with the versatility of the plasma polymerization. When mammalian cells were grown over these substrates, they avoided the fluoropolymer regions and grew almost exclusively within the exposed glass areas (windows).

A novel metal-protected plasma treatment for the robust bonding of polydimethylsiloxane.

We describe a method for the irreversible bonding of PDMS-based microfluidic components by exploiting the first reported "shelfable" plasma treatment of PDMS. Simultaneous plasma activation and protection of PDMS surfaces are achieved via RF magnetron sputtering of thin aluminium films in the presence of an argon plasma. In this process, Ar plasma exposure generates a hydrophilic, silanol-enriched polymer surface amenable to irreversible bonding to glass, PDMS or silicon substrates, while the aluminium film functions as a capping layer to preserve the surface functionality over several weeks of storage in ambient conditions.