(PhysOrg.com) -- A hotter home appears to produce babies with
better cognitive abilities - but before you turn up the home
heater to make your baby brainier, the research was conducted on
the Australian lizard Bassiana duperreyi by researchers from the
University of Sydney. Many traits in young reptiles are
determined by the temperature of the nest, so Joshua Amiel, a
PhD student in the School of Biological Sciences, and his
supervisor, Professor Rick Shine, looked at how incubation
temperature would affect the learning performance of these
lizards. Published in the UK's Royal Society journal Biology
Letters, the research found that lizard eggs incubated at higher
temperatures resulted in baby lizards with enhanced learning
performance. "Reptiles are interesting because their genes
aren't the only factor that affect basic features of their
biology. We know that the temperature of reptile nests
influences the sex, body size, body shape and locomotor
performance of hatchlings," Joshua Amiel said. "We wanted to