Could global warming be contributing to the resurgence of malaria in the East African Highlands?

Researchers at the University at Buffalo and the University of Pennsylvania were the first to demonstrate that two intracellular events, both stimulated by the same cell receptor, can provoke different behaviors in mammals.

Saving endangered species like pandas, gorillas and tigers helps reduce poverty and improve the lives of local communities, according to a new World Wildlife Fund report. Now as the eighth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity opens today in Curitiba, Brazil, WWF urges the CBD and member governments to integrate species conservation work into efforts to alleviate poverty.

The songs of the humpback whale are among the most complex in the animal kingdom. Researchers have now mathematically confirmed that whales have their own syntax that uses sound units to build phrases that can be combined to form songs that last for hours.

Most people know pectin as a common household gelling agent in making jams and jellies, but its uses are vast. It has anticancer properties, for instance, and may have a role in important biological functions including plant growth and development and defense against disease.

A group of medical experts who attended a national avian flu conference last fall believe there is little chance the United States will be able to manufacture and stockpile enough vaccine or antiviral medication to stop a bird flu pandemic should the virus mutate into a form that can be spread easily from human to human, according to a survey led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. The results of the survey will be published in the June 2006 issue of the journal Global Public Health.

Scientists supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have identified a defect in the immune response of people with the skin condition atopic dermatitis that puts them at risk of developing serious complications following smallpox vaccination. Led by Donald Y.M. Leung, M.D., Ph.D., of the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, the researchers used laboratory-grown human skin cells to show that an immune system protein called LL-37 is critical in controlling replication of vaccinia virus, the live virus that is the key component in standard smallpox vaccine.

The newly identified human bocavirus was found in nearly 5 percent of pneumonia patients in rural Thailand, mostly in very young children. Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report their findings today at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases

A new study by chemists and engineers at the University of Toronto describes a nanoscale material they've created that could help satisfy society's never-ending hunger for smaller digital devices and cellphones, and could even lead to new methods for delivering medications via skin patches.

Proteins, one of the basic components of living things, are among the most studied molecules in biochemistry. Understanding how proteins form or "fold" from sequenced strings of amino acids has long been one of the grand challenges of biology.

Endoscopic surgery brings many advantages for patients but is very difficult for the surgeon. Working at the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam, Joris Jaspers has developed two instruments which make this approach easier and also cheaper than with existing surgical robotics. Jaspers is awarded his doctorate on Wednesday 22 March at Delft University of Technology.