My Picks From ScienceDaily

Feasibility Of Preventing Malaria Parasite From Becoming Sexually Mature Demonstrated:

Researchers have demonstrated the possibility of preventing the human malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, which is responsible for more than a million malaria deaths a year, from becoming sexually mature.

New Barn Swallow Study Reveals Image Makes The Bird:

In the world of birds, where fancy can be as fleeting as flight, the color of the bird apparently has a profound effect on more than just its image. A new study of barn swallows reveals it also affects the bird's physiology.

Toad Research Could Leapfrog To New Muscle Model:

A toad sits at a pond's edge eyeing a cricket on a blade of grass. In the blink of an eye, the toad snares the insect with its tongue. This deceptively simple, remarkably fast feeding action offers a new look at how muscles work.

Kew Gardens Provides Climate For Agricultural Change:

A device to help some of the most impoverished farmers in Africa maximise their crop yields is being tested at London's Kew Gardens.

Factors That Make Bacteria More Modular Detailed:

Many bacteria break their metabolic processes into chunks. That may be logically tidy, but it's often metabolically inefficient. Researchers have now figured out the factors that tend to make bacteria more modular.

A Great Lakes Mystery: The Case Of The Disappearing Species:

Throughout the overlooked depths of Lake Michigan and other Great Lakes, a small but important animal is rapidly disappearing.

More like this

Malaria is one of mankind's oldest known killers, with descriptions of the disease dating back almost 5000 years. Each year, malaria causes 300-500 million infections, and up to 3 million deaths--about 5000 Africans die of the disease every day; one child succumbs every 30 seconds. The disease is…
Too Mellow For Our Predatory World: Flight Behaviour Of Marine Iguanas: Marine iguanas on the Galápagos Islands live without predators - at least this was the case up until 150 years ago. Since then they have been confronted with cats and dogs on some islands of the Archipelago. For scientists,…
Swine flu has made the world all too aware of the possibility of diseases making the leap from animal hosts to human ones. Now, we know that another disease made a similar transition from chimpanzees to humans, several thousand years ago. This particular infection is caused by a parasite, and a…
In the wild, as I wrote about last week, some strains of commensal bacteria in mosquitoes seem to confer some resistance to infection with Plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria in humans. Not content to wait for for nature to get around to it, researchers at Johns Hopkins University decided…

20 years ago, I worked at an environmental center in Finland, MN USA. As part of our lake studies class, we would catch a species of amphipod the size of a dime. They were abundant in the lake sediment, and large enough to kick a predacious diving beetle in the teeth and eat its lunch. Literally. Over the next 2 years this specie vanished completely and has never been seen since. This lake is near Lake Superior, but isolated from it by a small waterfall. Evidence of pollutants? I always wished someone would study this phenomenon, and now it seems someone is.

By Blind Squirrel FCD (not verified) on 02 Jun 2008 #permalink