Poor Mojo's Newswire

"We could be on the verge of seeing human development reverse for the first time in 30 years," Kevin Watkins, lead author of the report, told Reuters.

The report, to be presented in Brasilia on Tuesday, sets targets and a road map to reduce carbon emissions before a U.N. climate summit next month in Bali, Indonesia.

Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere help trap heat and lead to global warming.

"The message for Bali is the world cannot afford to wait, it has less than a decade to change course," said Watkins, a senior research fellow at Britain's Oxford University.

Researchers say the findings reveal that humans begin making social evaluations far earlier than previously thought.

"This is the very first experiment in anywhere near this age that shows babies develop preferences for individuals based on their actions," says Karen Wynn at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, US, who led the study.

Wynn and her colleagues studied the reactions of infants to a sketch in which a brightly coloured wooden block with goggly eyes attempts to climb up a hill. Much like in a puppet show, the infant could not see the person behind a curtain who controlled the character's movement with a wooden stick.

The Mangrove Rivulus, a type of small tropical killifish, seeks refuge in shallow pools of water in crab burrows, coconut shells or even old beer cans in the tropical mangrove swamps of Belize, Brazil and the United States.

When their habitat dries up, they live on the land in logs, said Scott Taylor, a researcher at the Brevard County Environmentally Endangered Lands Program in central Florida.

Using data from the US National Center for Health Statistics, William Lassek at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and Steven Gaulin of the University of California, Santa Barbara, found a child's performance in cognition tests was linked to their mother's waist-hip ratio, a proxy for how much fat she stores on her hips.

Children whose mothers had wide hips and a low waist-hip ratio scored highest, leading Lassek and Gaulin to suggest that fetuses benefit from a rich supply of useful fatty acids