Tyrannosaurus rex , Apatosaurus and the other dinosaur giants capture the popular imagination. But paleontologists often focus on smaller fry – especially with regard to the origin of birds, which are believed to have evolved from petite, predatory dinosaurs. Researchers describe one such specimen — the partial skeleton of a previously unknown genus of chicken-size dinosaur that roamed China’s Liaoning province nearly 130 million years ago — today in the journal Nature. According to

Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc., multinational manufacturer and distributor of life science research products and clinical diagnostics, has announced the creation of a complete solution for automated BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease) testing. This highly scalable platform is the first testing system of its kind, providing both screening and confirmation testing capabilities all in one package, and will enable laboratories to reduce staffing costs and increase the speed and security

’Sleeping your life away’ could be more than a saying.

Excessive sleeping may increase your risk of an early death by up to 15%. So hints a new analysis of data collected on one million people by the American Cancer Society. The figures cast doubt on the reputed benefits of eight hours’ sleep a night.

People with the longest lives get only seven hours of sleep each night, find psychiatrists at the University of California, San Diego 1 . Why seven is the magi

Monkey tests hint compound could paralyse malaria parasite in humans.

A new-found chemical can root out malaria parasites hiding in red blood cells and stop them reproducing. It may become a much-needed new weapon in the war against one of the world’s biggest killers.

The compound clears monkeys of infection with the human malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum at doses far lower than existing antimalarial drugs. But testing in humans is a few years away at least, say

Reptile history reveals daring escape from Madagascar

Land-lubber chameleons navigated the oceans to spread around the world. Stowed away on tree rafts, the animals were ferried to distant shores, new research suggests 1 .

Chameleons aren’t good swimmers: their mitten-like feet are made to grasp twigs and trees. Yet the intrepid animals charted the seas several times in the past 26 million years, say Chris Raxworthy of the American Museum of Natural History i

Patients who have been newly diagnosed with breast cancer now have access to the experiences of other people living with the disease via the multi-media website DIPEx (Database of Individual Patient Experiences), a resource of patient interviews in written form, audio and video clips. From today [13 Feburary 2002] the DIPEx website includes a new module on breast cancer, in addition to hypertension and prostate cancer.
The aim of the new module is to prepare those diagnosed with breast cancer fo

The mealybug Phenacoccus herreni feeds on cassava plant sap, inducing shrivelling. It causes extensive damage in cassava growing areas in South America. However, it can be parasitized by two wasps, Acerophagus coccois and Aenasius vexans which act out a ritual to recognize and select the individuals they are going to parasitize. A wasp moves from one side to the other of a potential victim, investigating it by palpation with their antennae. Once this “drumming and turning” procedure completed, the wa

Our skin takes its oxygen straight from the air.

The James Bond movie Goldfinger spawned the urban myth that a person can suffocate if air cannot reach their skin. But the plot contains a grain of truth, new research reveals – our skin gets its oxygen from the atmosphere, not the blood.

Air supplies the top 0.25-0.4 mm of the skin with oxygen, dermatologist Markus Stücker of the Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany, and his colleagues have found. This is almost 10 times

Average insect brain should help spot defects and their causes.

Two hair’s breadths long and five across – that’s the average capacity of a fly’s brain, German researchers have calculated. They hope to set a benchmark for crania by which oddballs can be judged.

Although it is a creature of little brain, the fruit fly ( Drosophila ) is popular with geneticists. Researchers often study flies that lack a particular gene, looking for flaws that might hint at

Large scale study spells out links with pregnancy and miscarriage.

Childless women are at a higher risk of developing breast cancer, confirms one of the largest studies on reproductive factors and the disease, but those who suffer miscarriages are not. Researchers are pinning down key risk factors in the hope of working out exactly how they increase susceptibility.

How pregnancy and abortion alter women’s chance of developing breast cancer has been the subject of conflictin

Underwater video reveals lobsters behaving badly.

A lobster-pot is more like a Wild West saloon than a cunningly laid snare. Lobsters show up for food and a fight, and only the unlucky few get reeled in, underwater video footage is revealing.

Camera recordings show that lobster traps catch a mere 6% of the animals that enter them. The result suggests that lobsters’ rowdy behaviour could be confusing attempts to count and size them, and so to manage the fishery 1

Ethical considerations aside, a major issue in cloning is whether or not clones are as healthy as normally conceived animals. The evidence so far has been mixed. Some cloned cows have received clean bills of health, but Dolly suffers from premature arthritis, and many cloned animals are obese. According to a report published online today by the journal Nature Genetics, mice cloned from somatic cells fare particularly poorly. Indeed, the study found that cloned mice had significantly shorter life span

The more affluent the area in which she lives, the more dissatisfied a woman is likely to be with her body image, indicates research in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

The researchers carried out a random telephone survey of 895 women aged 25 to 56. The women lived in 52 neighbourhoods in the provinces of Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec in Canada. The survey was designed to cover differing social and income brackets. National census data were then used to track the overall af

Injectable “suicide gene” therapy may be a highly effective way of preventing colon cancer from spreading (metastasising), finds research in Gut. Human colon cancer carries a high risk of death because it is often not found in the early stages and readily spreads to the liver, but also the lungs and throughout the abdominal cavity (peritoneum).

And the suicide gene treatment seems to be just as effective when injected beneath the skin as it is when introduced directly into the tumour site, t

New skin receptor is the tip of the iceberg.

A snowball in the face or a chilly breeze around the ankles opens a molecular trap door in our skin’s nerve cells, two studies now show 1 , 2 . A third suggests that this, the first cold sensor to be identified, is just the tip of the iceberg 3 .

How sensory neurons detect a drop in temperature is very hard to study because it affects so many cell processes.

David Julius of

The next generation of biomaterials will help the body heal itself by prompting cells to repair their own tissues, scientists report today.

Writing in a review in the journal Science, Professors Larry Hench and Julia Polak of Imperial College, London, highlight the potential of `third generation` biomaterials that activate specific cells and genes of the individual they are implanted into.

Pioneering work by the two authors recently led to the discovery of a family of bone f