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Biology

If you thought the sleep-deprived months with your newborn were tough, pity the poor mother dolphin or killer whale.

Reporting in the June 30 edition of the peer-reviewed journal Nature, UCLA/Veterans Affairs neuroscientists report a developmental pattern in bottlenose dolphins and killer whales that is unique from other mammals, with calves of both species active 24 hours a day during their first month.

Health & Medicine

Which is more likely to happen - you being in a car wreck or being bitten by a shark?

Those who answered that cars are greater killers win a free trip to the beach. It's really no contest, says a Texas A&M University professor. Your chances of being in a wreck are far greater than being a shark's lunch, says John McEachran, a professor of wildlife and fishery sciences who has studied sharks for years.

AIDS & HIV

As a part of a research collaboration, scientists at the Sahlgrenska Academy at Göteborg University, Sweden, have developed a new drug candidate against HIV-infection. The new substance, named alphaHGA, will be tested on patients this year. In a thesis from the Sahlgrenska Academy, parts of the research essential for the performance of the clinical trial are presented.

Microarray

Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) today introduced the industry's most up-to-date microarray to provide genome-wide coverage of the zebrafish (Danio rerio), and the first commercial whole mouse genome microarray based on the National Institute on Aging (NIA) Mouse Gene Index. The zebrafish and mouse microarrays were developed in collaboration with Icoria (a member of the Toxicogenomics Consortium) and the NIA, respectively.

Environment

On July 19, 2005, at the Society of Conservation Biology annual meetings, in Brasília, Brazil, the Woods Hole Research Center and the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazonia (IPAM) will hold an international symposium on the prospects for large-scale conservation of natural resources in the Amazon Basin.

Biology

Cardiff (UK) scientists are playing a major role in a NASA mission, which they believe could reveal living matter in the icy layers beneath the surface of a comet.

NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft will make a historic encounter with Comet Tempel-1 on 4th July, when a metre-long projectile will crash into the comet and tunnel through its outer layers, producing a crater and a plume of gas and dust.

Bioinformatics

Investigators from the University California, San Diego (UCSD) Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) and NimbleGen Systems have developed an efficient method to identify thousands of regulatory sequences in the human genome, according to a study published today in Nature.