Three clinical trials in Africa found that adult male circumcision reduced the risk of men acquiring HIV infection from heterosexual sex by 51-60%. While adult male circumcision may also have a role to play in preventing HIV transmission in the US, say scientists at the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in a paper in PLoS Medicine, "the extent of this role on a population basis is unknown."

Working in the Department of Ecology and Organismal Biology, Justin Boyles and Jonathan Storm examined the possibility of a link between dietary specialization and the risk of extinction for bats in Australia, Europe and North America.

Faster growth, darker leaves, a different way of branching - wild varieties of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana are often substantially different from the laboratory strain of this small mustard plant, a favorite of many plant biologists. Which detailed differences distinguish the genomes of strains from the polar circle or the subtropics, from America, Africa or Asia has been investigated for the first time by research teams from Tübingen, Germany, and California led by Detlef Weigel from the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology. The results were surprising: The extent of the genetic differences far exceeds the expectations for such a streamlined genome, as the scientists write in this week’s edition of Science magazine.
Arabidopsis plants from different geographical origins differ in many traits (the background shows schematically sequence variation in the DNA of these plants).

This international collaboration has been the largest ever to have taken place in a large scale study on genetic differences between patients infected by HIV, and is the first study of this kind in the field of infectious disease. Catalan participants have been coordinated by Javier Martínez-Picado, ICREA research professor in the Foundation irsiCaixa of Hospital Germans Trias i Pujol, and Josep M. Miró, consultant of the Unit of Infectious Diseases and AIDS of Hospital Clínic-IDIBAPS of Barcelona, and had the collaboration of Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, and Hospital Mútua de Terrassa.

Nature is a valued source of inspiration for artists. But what have artists offered the natural world" Would a bird even like rock and roll"

When nicotine binds to a neuron, how does the cell know to send the signal that announces a smoker’s high"