A University of Leicester researcher has discovered how a protein in the blood – linked to defence against meningitis - plays a more vital role than previously understood in the body’s immune defence system.

An outbreak of the insidious ´screw worm´ fly in Yemen, is threatening livelihoods, in a country where rearing livestock is a traditional way of life. In recent weeks, a Ministerial delegation was at the IAEA in Vienna, Austria, to turn to the international community for emergency assistance to fight the deadly pest.

With nearly one-third of amphibian species threatened with extinction worldwide, fueled in part by the widespread emergence of the deadly chytrid fungus, effective conservation efforts could not be more urgent. In a new article in the open-access journal PLoS Biology, Franco Andreone and his colleagues argue that one of the best places to focus these efforts is Madagascar, a global hotspot of amphibian diversity that shows no signs of amphibian declines—or traces of the chytrid fungus.

As HIV disease progresses in a person infected with the HIV virus, a group of cells in the immune system, the CD8+ T lymphocytes, become “exhausted,” losing many of their abilities to kill other cells infected by the virus. For many years scientists have debated whether this exhaustion of CD8+ T cells is the cause, or the consequence, of persistence of the HIV virus. In a study published this week in PLoS Medicine, Marcus Altfeld and colleagues studied the immune response over time amongst 18 individuals who had very recently become infected with HIV.

The quality of pollen a plant produces is closely tied to its sexual habits, ecologists have discovered. As well as helping explain the evolution of such intimate relationships between plants and pollinators, the study – one of the first of its kind and published online in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology – also helps explain the recent dramatic decline in certain bumblebee species found in the shrinking areas of species-rich chalk grasslands and hay meadows across Northern Europe.

This leaf beetle, which lives in the cloud forest on the east slope of the Andes Mountains in Ecuador, is from the family Chrysomelidae. Climate change could have a much bigger impact on such tropical species than scientists previously thought. Credit: Kimberly Sheldon, University of Washignton Polar bears fighting for survival in the face of a rapid decline of polar ice have made the Arctic a poster child for the negative effects of climate change. But new research shows that species living in the tropics likely face the greatest peril in a warmer world.

Whole-organ maps that superimpose genetic information over the terrain of cancerous bladders chart the molecular journey from normal cell to invasive cancer, an international research team led by scientists at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center reports online at the journal Laboratory Investigation, a member of the Nature Publishing Group.

University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston researchers have achieved promising results with a potential new weapon against respiratory syncytial virus, the most common cause of infant hospitalization in the United States.