Life Sciences and Chemistry

The international used tyre trade is bringing unwanted visitors to Europe – exotic mosquitoes. Species such as the Asian ‘Tiger Mosquito’ are able to survive in temperate climates, spread diseases (such as dengue and West Nile virus, among others) and may be poised to take Britain by surprise, unless monitoring systems are put in place.

Tiger mosquitoes lay their eggs around places that are prone to flooding. Their eggs can survive long periods of drought and, when a pool forms, the larvae

Every kilogram of predator needs a fixed amount of prey.

Every kilogram of meat-eating mammal needs 111 kilograms of prey to sustain it, say two ecologists. The rule holds from weasels to bears.

With many species of carnivore endangered, the discovery could help conservationists work out how to maintain a species’ resource base.

Chris Carbone, of the Institute of Zoology, London, and John Gittleman, of the University of Virginia, found the rule when they compare

Scientists in America have made the first steps in identifying a group of genes which may be involved in the progression of breast cancer from non-invasive to invasive, the 3rd European Breast Cancer Conference in Barcelona heard today (Thursday 21 March).

Professor Craig Allred, Director of Breast Pathology at the Breast Center, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, USA, used a technique called microarray to discover which genes might be involved in causing ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) to

Mushrooms (of course, those grown in an ecologically safe area) accumulate many microelements good for human and animal health, in particular, selenium. The natural cycle of selenium was studied by a team from the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry in Moscow.

The scientific expedition worked in the eastern part of the Meshchera (at the meeting point of the Moscow, Ryazan, and Vladimir areas). Scientists found selenium in many natural objects (soil, grass, le

Because living organisms contain millions of different molecules, identifying or separating any single one of these from their natural environment in order to carry out research work or perform diagnoses is quite like looking for a needle in a haystack. A number of molecular separation technologies are of course available, and are used by laboratories on a daily basis, but they are often unwieldy and costly. Scientists the world over are therefore attempting to develop a new generation of analytic de

Formidable catalogue puts army of ants online.

After four years of cooperation and tenacity worthy of their quarry, ant experts have completed Antbase, a centralized, online information resource cataloguing all 11,000 known species of ant.

Its creators hope that Antbase will one day become the ant equivalent of GenBank, the public database of genetic sequence data, and a boon not just for ant specialists, but for entomologists and ecologists of every kind.

Ant ta