Sperm go slow without a crucial protein.

The discovery of a protein that is crucial to sperm swimming in mice could lead to new male or female contraceptives or fertility treatments.

The protein forms a channel through the membrane of the sperm tail. It controls the inflow of calcium ions that trigger swimming.

All humans have the gene that encodes the channel, but it is switched on only in sperm cells. This would lessen the risk of side-effects from any channel-blo

Chemists copy bacterial tricks for making clean fuel.

Bacteria are teaching chemists their tips for creating lean, green fuel. US researchers have developed a catalyst based on a bacterial enzyme that converts cheap acids to hydrogen, the ultimate clean power source.

Unlike other fuels, hydrogen is non-polluting: its combustion makes only water, instead of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide or the poison carbon monoxide. Thomas Rauchfuss and colleagues at the University of Illino

Sequencers expose secret chromosome centre.

February’s celebrations hid a dark secret: the human genome sequencers hadn’t touched the hearts of our chromosomes. Now, at last, one chromosome’s inscrutable midpoint, its centromere, has given up its genetic secrets.

Centromeres look like the ’waist’ in an X. They share out chromosomes fairly when a cell divides. Defective centromeres may underlie many cancers, in which problems with chromosome movement

Stripes help chemists shop for molecules.

Scientists may soon be sticking bar-coded metal rods into molecules to see what they do in a crowd 1 . The rods could help to track the functions and interactions of genes, and may aid drug discovery.

At only a few thousandths of a millimetre long, the rods are small enough to fit inside a single red blood cell. Christine Keating, of Pennsylvania State University, and colleagues cast them inside cylindrical pores in a

A new way to find genes and map disease.

A new technique should aid the hunt for genes in the human genome sequence. The method, which tracks only switched-on genes in cells, will help researchers to distinguish between diseased and normal tissues, and could point the way to new treatments.

Andrew Simpson, of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and colleagues have produced a whopping 700,000 DNA tags, representing the genes that are active in 24 no

Spells and incantations step aside: scientists have found a genetic elixir of love. It makes males more faithful to females and more friendly to fellow males. It could also shed light on bonding disorders such as autism.

Larry Young of Emory University in Georgia and colleagues used a virus to deliver a gene straight to the part of voles’ brains responsible for rewards and addiction, the ventral pallidum. The gene made the animals’ brains more receptive to the hormone vasopressin 1

Museum exhibits’ genes record British forestry policies

Commercial forest planting in the north of England drew red squirrels westwards in the 1980s say UK researchers. This migration led to big changes in squirrel numbers and genetics.

The finding has implications for the protection of the endangered red squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris). Many conservationists advocate leaving ’wildlife corridors’ for animals to travel between patches of fragmenting habitat. This is the first evi

Mouse studies emphasize children’s cancer risk from sunburn.

Serious sunburn in childhood may raise the risk of developing the deadliest form of skin cancer as an adult, research in mice suggests 1 . The experiments could lead to a better understanding of malignant melanoma and of how and when to protect ourselves from the sun.

“I have my kids wear hats and put sunscreen on like crazy now,” says the study’s leader Glenn Merlino, of the National Cancer Institu

Fossils bridge gap between land mammals and whales.

Fifty million years ago, two mammals roamed the desert landscapes of what is now Pakistan. They looked a bit like dogs. They were, in fact, land-living, four-legged whales.

Their new-found fossils join other famous missing links, such as the primitive bird Archaeopteryx , that show how one group of animals evolved into another. And they undermine the two prevailing theories about which land mammals are most closely re

New-found jawbone hints at 200 thousand years of care in the community.

Care for the elderly and disabled may have been around a lot longer than we thought. The discovery of a jawbone scarred by severe gum disease hints that a toothless early human got by with a little help from his friends.

Minus teeth, unable to chew his or her food, the owner of the deformed jawbone nonetheless survived “for at least several months,” estimates anthropologist Erik Trinkaus of Washington U

A virus that exploits a gene defect common to cancer cells and selectively kills them may offer a new avenue for therapy, suggest researchers in Nature.

The gene p53 is mutated in about half of all human cancers (an event directly implicated in tumour progression) so a way of killing such cells offers the attractive possibility of treating multiple cancer types with one drug. The human adeno-associated virus (AAV) selectively induces cell death in p53-defective cells, Peter Beard and his co

Centipede genealogy has scientists and supercomputers foxed

Four-fifths of all known creatures are arthropods. So immense is this family that no one knows who is related to whom. To resolve the relationships between the family members, the insects, spiders, crustaceans and centipedes, two research groups have performed state-of-the-art analyses – and come up with two different answers.

The main problem is the centipedes and millipedes, collectively called the myriapods. One

Two new techniques will assist the rapid cataloguing of proteins’ roles in the cell.

Decoding the human genome sequence was merely a preliminary step towards understanding how living cells work. Two new techniques should assist the next step: working out the functions of all the proteins that the genes encode 1,2 .

Selectively sticking to small molecules is central to most proteins’ function. Proteins generally have delicately sculpted binding sites, clefts i

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