Many countries now acknowledge the need to obtain their energy supply from renewable sources such as biomass. Prof. Verstraete will explain how his team have developed a new anaerobic digestion reactor which can generate as much electricity as 25 wind turbines. These reactors use a consortium of methanogenic (methane-producing) bacteria to degrade waste and energy crops to produce biogas (a mixture of methane and carbon) which is then converted to electricity using a turbine.

Despite its primitive structure, the North American comb jellyfish can sneak up on its prey like a high-tech stealth submarine, making it a successful predator. Researchers, including one from the University of Gothenburg, have now been able to show how the jellyfish makes itself hydrodynamically 'invisible'.

Researchers looking at corals in the western tropical Pacific Ocean have found records linking a profound shift in the depth of the division between warm surface water and colder, deeper water traceable to recent global warming.

The genetic inherited material DNA was long viewed as the sole bearer of hereditary information. The function of its packaging proteins, the histones, was believed to be exclusively structural. Additional genetic information can be stored, however, and passed on to subsequent generations through chemical changes in the DNA or histones. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen have succeeded in creating an experimental system for testing the function of such chemical histone modifications and their influence on the organism. Chemical modifications to the histones may constitute an "epigenetic histone code" that complements the genetic code and decides whether the information from certain regions of the DNA is used or suppressed. (EMBO reports, November 1, 2010, advance online publication)

A redesigned version of the CTC-Chip – a microchip-based device for capturing rare circulating tumor cells (CTCs) – appears to be more effective and should be easier to manufacture than the original. Called the HB-(herringbone) Chip, the new device also may provide more comprehensive and easily accessible data from captured tumor cells. Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) researchers – including members of the team that developed the CTC-Chip – report the second-generation device in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper that has been released online.