Just a quick word to say that I probably won't be able to update the site daily in the next few weeks; it's vacation time in Cozumel (scuba diving!) and after that I'll attend the AIDS 2008 conference in Mexico (where I will present some results of my PhD). I'll do my best to keep the site updated, but internet access might be hard to find on a reliable basis. Thanks for your understanding!

Angiocidin, a tumor-inhibiting novel protein discovered by Temple University researchers, may also have a role as a new therapeutic application in treating leukemia, according to a study by the researchers.

With a name like "Leatherback Turtle" you might think the sea turtles could stand up to just about anything the ocean can throw at them, and for more than a hundred million years, they have. But tough, long-lived critters though they are, the population of leatherbacks in the eastern Pacific Ocean has plummeted by over 90 percent in the last 20 years.

It's not always easy spotting the cuckoo in the nest. But if you don't, you pay a high price raising someone else's chick. How hosts distinguish impostor eggs from their own has long puzzled scientists. The problem remained largely unsolved while looking at it through our own eyes. It was only when people started thinking from the birds' perspective that they began to understand how hosts recognise a cuckoo egg in the nest. Marcel Honza from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic explains that birds see UV wavelengths that are well outside our own visual range. Knowing that many bird eggs reflect UV wavelengths, Honza wondered whether altering the reflected UV spectrum of an egg would affect a bird's ability to recognise it as foreign and reject it. Would a blackcap recognise and evict an impostor egg if the reflected UV spectrum were different from the wavelengths reflected by the bird's own clutch? Teaming up with Lenka Polačiková, Honza headed into a near-by forest to test blackcap responses to impostor eggs and publish their findings on July 18th in The Journal of Experimental Biology at http://jeb.biologists.org.