New research has revealed for the first time the catastrophic effect of a deadly virus on Britain's native red squirrels.

A computer model newly developed by researchers combines ocean current simulations and genetic forecasting to help scientists predict animal dispersion patterns and details of the ecology of coral reefs across the Caribbean Sea. The work is reported by Heather M. Galindo and Stephen R. Palumbi of Stanford University, and Donald B. Olson of the University of Miami, and appears in the August 22nd issue of Current Biology, published by Cell Press.

Microscopic examination of tumor specimens cannot always predict a cancer's aggressiveness, leading to increased interest in molecular approaches to diagnosis. Now, researchers in the Children's Hospital Informatics Program (CHIP) at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology report that a genetic profile indicating chromosomal instability -- an increased tendency to develop chromosomal aberrations, critical in cancer development -- is predictive of clinical outcome in a broad range of cancer types.

Incomplete vaccination of poultry flocks could make the spread of deadly strains of avian flu such as H5N1 worse, scientists at the Universities of Edinburgh and Warwick have found. The research shows that even though the available vaccines are effective on individual birds, the disease is likely to spread unless almost all of a flock has been protected. The study, published in Nature journal, is the first to quantify how incomplete vaccination of flocks can contribute to the undetected spread of the disease.

A chewing gum containing good bacteria that can destroy the bad bacteria that cause tooth decay could be in the shops soon reports Marina Murphy in C&I. The gum is one of several products being developed by German chemical company BASF using the bacteria Lactobacillus, which is normally found in live yoghurt.

American and South African scientists working at the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa have discovered how the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) "exhausts" killer T cells that would otherwise attack the virus. The researchers found that HIV can simply "turn off" fully functional T cells by flipping a molecular switch on the cells. In test tube studies, however, the scientists showed that they could reinvigorate the killer T cells by blocking that inhibitory switch, which is called programmed death-1 (PD-1).

A shell from the venomous cone snail Conus omaria, which lives in the Pacific and Indian oceans and eats other snails. University of Utah researchers isolated an unusual nerve toxin in an ocean-dwelling snail, and say its ability to glom onto the brain's nicotine receptors may be useful for designing new drugs to treat a variety of psychiatric and brain diseases.

Mayo Clinic researchers have found that years after experiencing childhood polio, most survivors do not experience declines greater than expected in their elderly counterparts, but rather experience only modest increased weakness which may be commensurate with normal aging.