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 Analysis of Computer Worm Indicates Additional Destructive Payload Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC), a world leader in Internet security, today announced that new analysis of W32.Nimda.A@mm reveals that the worm contains an additional destructive payload that will not only require detection, but removal. The new analysis indicates that the worm is a file infector, overwriting .exe files. W32.Nimda.A@mm is a mass-mailing worm that utilizes multiple methods to spread itself. The worm

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

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

Silicon still has a lot to offer the microelectronics industry

The end is not nigh for silicon chips. They have “enormous remaining potential”, predicts a new analysis of the limits of integrated circuit technology 1 .

By around 2011, chips could be holding thousands of times more transistors than the billions they house today, calculate James Meindl and colleagues at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Trillion-transistor chips are known as ’terascal

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