The oldest ecological experiment in the world, set up almost 150 years ago to see whether inorganic fertilisers could produce more grass than traditional animal manures, is becoming an important source of evidence on the impact of climate change on genetic variation in plants.

Speaking at the British Ecological Society’s Annual Meeting, being held at Manchester Metropolitan University on 9-11 September 2003, Professor Jonathan Silvertown of the Open University will explain what the Park Gra

b>New research has proved that sage can improve memory, confirming centuries-old theories.

British scientists have carried out the first clinical trials with healthy, young adults and found that those who had taken sage oil capsules performed significantly better in a word recall test.

The team, from the Medicinal Plant Research Centre (MPRC) at the Universities of Newcastle and Northumbria, UK, have provided scientific evidence for claims dating back centuries.

They

An international study in this week’s issue of THE LANCET suggests that prognosis for patients with HIV/AIDS might be more reliably determined six months after initiation of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), rather than before the start of treatment.

HAART became widespread in more-developed countries from 1996 onwards, and has improved the prognosis of HIV-1 infection. However, not enough is known about how to predict the prognosis of people with HIV-1 infection starting HAART.

Puberty blues: goby fish choose their sex to find a mate

Research on the Great Barrier Reef has revealed that some young reef fish can choose when they mature and which sex they want to be when they grow up.

Research conducted by JP Hobbs, an honours student at James Cook University, Townsville, focused on a colourful goby that lives in bushy corals. The research may win him a British Council sponsored study tour of the UK.

Announcing his research results at Fresh Sc

Harry Green comments on a paper in Nature

In a commentary in the Aug. 21 issue of Nature, Harry Green, Distinguished Professor of Geology and Geophysics in the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and the department of earth sciences at UC Riverside, explains that two large, deep earthquakes (depth > 300 km below the surface of the earth) that occurred in Aug. 2002 in the Tonga subduction zone were causally related.

The Tonga subduction zone is approximately beneath

A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory physicist, in collaboration with an international team of researchers, has developed an experimental method that allows scientists to investigate the behavior of proteins under non-equilibrium conditions one molecule at a time, to better understand a fundamental biological process of protein folding that is important for many diseases.

The work, presented in the Aug. 29 edition of Science, marks the first time protein-folding kinetics has been monitor