Life Sciences and Chemistry

Chimpanzee waste could shed light on the origins and spread of HIV.

Delving into droppings has given AIDS researchers a surprise. Far fewer chimpanzees than they had suspected have SIVcpz, the animal virus most like HIV.

The technique could shed much-needed light on the origins and evolution of the viruses that cause AIDS. “It’s a non-invasive means to study the wild relative of HIV in its natural environment,” says Beatrice Hahn, of the University of Alabama in Birmingham,

A new type of Earth ecosystem could be found on other planets.

Scientists have found a community of microbes unlike anything else on Earth. Conditions in this ecosystem could mimic those on Earth when life began, and might exist elsewhere in today’s Solar System.

Home to the microbes is a hot spring 200 metres beneath the US state of Idaho. Their lives owe nothing to the Sun. They generate energy by combining hydrogen from rocks with carbon dioxide, releasing methane as a by

A new theory on the evolution of ancient microbes is set to challenge widespread scientific views of early life on earth and could overturn previous interpretations of the huge bank of molecular taxonomic data that has been built up in recent years, according to research published today in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology.

“I`ve reinterpreted fossil records to show that eukaryotes, which includes plants, animals and fungi, are only half as old as previous

Most mothers-to-be must simply hope for healthy offspring. But female house finches tip the odds in their babies’ favor by pre-determining their gender, a new study suggests. According to a report published in the current issue of the journal Science, enterprising mother house finches adjust the sex and growth of their offspring to account for the order in which the eggs are laid, thereby reducing the mortality of their sons and daughters by 10 to 20 percent.

Alexander Badyaev of the Univer

Scientists are calling it “biology of the next generation,” and a major step towards transforming information from genome projects into applications such as the discovery of new drugs. Today researchers from Heidelberg have announced the completion of a large-scale study of the “molecular machines” formed by nearly two thousand proteins in a living cell.

In a paper published in the current edition of Nature, a team of scientists from the biotechnology start-up company CellZome and the Europe

BSE in sheep: first estimates of human death toll

The first attempt to estimate the human health risk from possible BSE infection of the British sheep flock is published today by researchers from Imperial College, London.

They show that while the present risk of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) from eating sheep could be greater than that from cattle, the overall historical risk from sheep is much less than that from cattle.

The research, which is reported in the jo