Each spring, amid the decaying rubble of dead prairie plants, emerging male gall wasps find mates by calling upon the chemistry prowess of their predecessors, entomologists scouring Central Illinois have discovered.

In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report that as adult gall wasps (Antistrophus rufus) feed in warm weather, they change the ratio of plant chemicals so that males emerging after the winter season can recognize when they are on the right stems at the r

Two specific genes involved in cholesterol transport are required for the most common way excess cholesterol is expelled from our bodies, according to scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

The genes, the researchers report, are essential for efficient secretion of cholesterol into the bile, which is the major route that cholesterol exits the body. The discovery sheds new light on potential therapies that could play an important role in reducing high cholesterol, a ma

NSF awards grants to discover the relationships of 1.75 million species One of the most profound ideas to emerge in modern science is Charles Darwin’s concept that all of life, from the smallest microorganism to the largest vertebrate, is connected through genetic relatedness in a vast genealogy. This “Tree of Life” summarizes all we know about biological diversity and underpins much of modern biology, yet many of its branches remain poorly known and unresolved. To help

A new array of ocean robots has begun working deep in the Indian Ocean to help scientists understand Australia’s changing climate.

“This is a key region for the global climate system and installation of the robots will provide our best coverage to begin to understand how the Indian Ocean affects our climate,” says CSIRO’s Dr Gary Meyers.

Cycling between the surface and a depth of two kilometres every 10 days, the ocean robots are sampling conditions in a region thought to

Thousands in southern Asia could be drinking arsenic-contaminated water from wells that are falsely labeled safe, while precious good water sits untapped in wells that are wrongly marked unsafe — a dire disparity for countries where water can be more valuable than gold.

A new study of wells in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India, suggests the arsenic test kits used by field workers are frequently inaccurate, producing scores of incorrectly labeled wells. The findings were published this month

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and their collaborators have discovered that some viruses can use the most abundant protein in the cells they are infecting to destroy the cells and allow new viruses to escape to infect others. The findings, described in the November 29, 2002, issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, build upon earlier Brookhaven research on how virus particles become infectious (see related story) and may lead to the design of m