Madagascar hissing cockroach. Their gentle nature, large size, odd sounds and low-maintenance care have made Madagascar hissing cockroaches popular educational tools and pets for years. But the giant insects also have one unfortunate characteristic: Their hard bodies and feces are home to many mold species that could be triggering allergies in the kids and adults who handle the bugs, according to a new study.

A saiga mother and calf. Saiga are now threatened by development in Mongolia that threatens to choke off a key migration route. Take a deer’s body, attach a camel’s head and add a Jimmy Durante nose, and you have a saiga – the odd-ball antelope with the enormous schnoz that lives on the isolated steppes of Central Asia. Unfortunately, they are as endangered as they are strange-looking due to over-hunting. Now, according to a recent Wildlife Conservation Society study, their migration routes are in jeopardy as well.

Human diseases and social networks would seem to have little in common. However, at the crux of these two lies a network, communities within the network, and farther even, substructures of the communities. In a recent paper in Physical Review E 77:016104 (2008), Weixiong Zhang, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of computer science and engineering and of genetics, and his Ph.D. student, Jianhua Ruan, published an algorithm, a recipe of computer instructions, to automatically discover communities and their subtle structures in various networks.

Fungi do not have sexes, just so-called mating types. A new study being published today in the prestigious journal PLoS shows that there are great similarities between the parts of DNA that determine the sex of plants and animals and the parts of DNA that determine mating types in certain fungi. This makes fungi interesting as new model organisms in studies of the evolutionary development of sex chromosomes.

Scientists at the University of Bonn have discovered a new rare type of haemo-globin. Haemoglobin transports oxygen in the red blood corpuscles. When bound to oxygen it changes colour. The new haemoglobin type appears optically to be transporting little oxygen. Measurements of the blood oxygen level therefore present a similar picture to patients suffering from an inherited cardiac defect. After examining two patients, the scientists now understand that the new type of haemoglobin distorts the level of oxygen measured. The scientists have named the type 'Haemoglobin Bonn'. They have published their discovery in the current issue of the scientific journal 'Clinical Chemistry'. The article can be downloaded from http://www.clinchem.org/cgi/content/full/54/3/594.

It’s common knowledge that humans and other animals are able to visually judge depth because we have two eyes and the brain compares the images from each. But we can also judge depth with only one eye, and scientists have been searching for how the brain accomplishes that feat.

One aquarium fish’s uncanny ability to regenerate essentially any cell type has given scientists a way to mimic cell loss that occurs in diseases such as Parkinson’s and diabetes then watch how the fish make more of them.

According to researchers at the Monell Center, fruit flies are more like humans in their responses to many sweet tastes than are almost any other species.