Scientists have discovered that migrating dragonfliesand songbirds exhibit many of the same behaviors, suggesting the rulesthat govern such long-distance travel may be simpler and more ancientthan was once thought.

Researchers from the Floral Genome Project at Penn State University, with an international team of collaborators, have proposed an answer to Charles Darwin's "abominable mystery:" the inexplicably rapid evolution of flowering plants immediately after their first appearance some 140 million years ago. By developing new statistical methods to analyze incomplete DNA sequences from thirteen strategically selected plant species, the researchers uncovered a previously hidden "paleopolyploidy" event, an ancient whole-genome duplication that preceded the appearance of the ancestral flowering plant. The results will appear in the June issue of Genome Research.

Last week Scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research observed the highest air pollution on record since measurements began in Ny-Ålesund on Svalbard. Monitoring instruments displayed significantly increased aerosol concentrations compared to those generally found. Aerosols from eastern Europe have been transported into the Arctic atmosphere due to a particular large-scale weather situation.

A team of researchers working at the University of Bristol has found a potential new treatment for listeriosis, a deadly form of food poisoning. Their work is reported in Nature Medicine.

Researchers from Delft University of Technology's Kavli Institute of Nanoscience have discovered how to use the motors of biological cells in extremely small channels on a chip. Based on this, they built a transport system that uses electrical charges to direct the molecules individually. To demonstrate this, the Delft researchers sorted the individual molecules according to their color. Professor Hess of the University of Florida has called the Delft discovery "the first traffic control system in biomolecular motor nanotechnology". The research findings will be published in Science on May 12.

For the first time in 83 years, scientists have identified a new genus of a living primate from Africa, according to research to be published by Science May 11 in the online Science Express.