My poster for Mexico is at the printing press right now, can't wait to see the result on Monday! Let's hope everything is ok, cause my plane is scheduled on Wednesday, so I won't have time to print it again... wish me luck! Speaking of the plane, it'll be my first flight! Can't say I'm not a little nervous (who isn't), but it should be alright! Hopefully I'll be able to update the site daily in Mexico (loaded Thunderbird on a USB key with my RSS feeds / mailing lists), so you'll still get your news! Speaking of news, I have a biiiig backlog of interesting links I did not have time to post, so here's some of them! The rest will follow over the weekend.

- French maize farmer sees more GMO converts
- China approves new GMO cotton to raise output
- Global plan to rescue amphibians
- Pollution turns China village into cancer cluster
- Poor Asian farmers are weak link in bird flu fight
- Lions eat 20 villagers in Ethiopia
- Tiny microscope peers into mice brains

The risk of acquiring HIV rises during pregnancy, according to a study of women in Uganda's Rakai District led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The increased risk for acquiring HIV remained even after researchers controlled for behavior and other factors that contribute to HIV risk. The findings, which are published in the September 30, 2005, edition of The Lancet, suggest that the increased risk was likely due to biological changes during pregnancy.

New genes tied to lifespan extension in yeast have been identified by researchers from UC Davis and Harvard Medical School.

In the human brain, cells talk to one another through the routine exchange of electrical signals. But when people fall into a deep sleep, the higher regions of the brain - regions that during waking hours are a bustling grid of neural dialogue - apparently lose their ability to communicate effectively, causing consciousness to fade.

A new weapon in the battle against HIV may come from an unusual source -- a small tropical frog.

While a chattering crowd of various species of bacteria is essentially a microbial tower of Babel, certain snippets of their chemical conversation are almost universally understood. HHMI researchers have found that bacteria of different species can talk to each other using a common language � and also that some species can manipulate the conversation to confuse other bacteria.