Previously unobservable events occurring between insemination and fertilization are the subject of a groundbreaking new article in Science magazine (March 18) by Mollie Manier, John Belote and Scott Pitnick, professors of biology in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences. By genetically altering fruit flies so that the heads of their sperm were fluorescent green or red, Belote and his colleagues were able to observe in striking detail what happens to live sperm inside the female. The findings may have huge implications for the fields of reproductive biology, sexual selection and speciation.

Once the human genome was sequenced in 2001, the hunt was on for the genes that make each of us unique. But scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and Yale and Stanford Universities in the USA, have found that we differ from each other mainly because of differences not in our genes, but in how they're regulated – turned on or off, for instance. In a study published today in Science, they are the first to compare entire human genomes and determine which changes in the stretches of DNA that lie between genes make gene regulation vary from one person to the next. Their findings hail a new way of thinking about ourselves and our diseases.

Urgent law enforcement action by governments in Central and West Africa and South-east Asia is crucial to addressing the illicit ivory trade, according to a new analysis of elephant trade data released today.

A team of Spanish researchers has studied the diet of three species of sharks living in the deep waters in the area of El Cachucho, the first Protected Marine Area in Spain, which is located in the Cantabrian Sea off the coast of Asturias. These animals feed on the resources available in their environment, according to changes taking place in the ocean depths.

Bees see the world almost five times faster than humans, according to new research from scientists at Queen Mary, University of London.

Dogs likely originated in the Middle East, not Asia or Europe, according to a new genetic analysis by an international team of scientists led by UCLA biologists. The research, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Searle Scholars Program, appears March 17 in the advance online edition of the journal Nature.

It might sound like a mashup of monster movies, but palaeontologists have discovered evidence of how an extinct shark attacked its prey, reconstructing a killing that took place 4 million years ago.

What is causing the largest die-off of great whales ever recorded?

Each cusp of our teeth is regulated by genes which carefully control the development. A similar genetic puzzle also regulates the differentiation of our other organs and of all living organisms. A team of researchers at the Institute of Biotechnology of the University of Helsinki has developed a computer model reproducing population-level variation in complex structures like teeth and organs. The research takes a step towards the growing of correctly shaped teeth and other organs. The results were published last week in Nature, the esteemed science journal.

An international team led by scientists at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich,UK, have transferred broad spectrum resistance against some important plant diseases across different plant families. This breakthrough provides a new way to produce crops with sustainable resistance to economically important diseases.

Researchers at the University of Calgary have discovered the unique genes that allow the opium poppy to make codeine and morphine, thus opening doors to alternate methods of producing these effective painkillers either by manufacturing them in a lab or controlling the production of these compounds in the plant.

Blind scorpions that live in the stygian depths of caves are throwing light on a long-held assumption that specialized adaptations are irreversible evolutionary dead-ends. According to a new phylogenetic analysis of the family Typhlochactidae, scorpions currently living closer to the surface (under stones and in leaf litter) evolved independently on more than one occasion from ancestors adapted to life further below the surface (in caves). The research, currently available in an early online edition, will be published in the April issue of Cladistics.

In the far northern reaches of the Arctic, day versus night often doesn't mean a whole lot. During parts of the year, the sun does not set; at other times, it's just the opposite. A new study reported online on March 11th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, shows that Arctic reindeer have come up with a solution to living under those extreme conditions: They've abandoned use of the internal clock that drives the daily biological rhythms in other organisms.

A puzzle that has baffled scientists for centuries – why some birds appear to be male on one side of the body and female on the other – has been solved by researchers.

Days after celebrating its second anniversary, the Svalbard "Doomsday" Global Seed Vault is receiving this week thousands of new seeds that will push its collection to more than half a million unique samples, making it the most diverse assemblage of crop diversity ever amassed anywhere in the world.

Between the grains of sand on the sea floor there is an unknown and unexplored world. Pierre De Wit at Gothenburg University knows this well, and has found new animal species on the Great Barrier Reef, in New Caledonia and in the sea off the Gullmarsfjord in the Swedish county of Bohuslän.

The King Cobra continues to weave its charm with researchers identifying a protein in its venom with the potential for new drug discovery and to advance understanding of disease mechanisms.

An Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientist is helping to sort through the jumbled genetics of Echinacea, the coneflower known for its blossoms--and its potential for treating infections, inflammation, and other human ailments.

Two Dartmouth biologists have found that brown anole lizards make an interesting choice when deciding which males should father their offspring. The females of this species mate with several males, then produce more sons with sperm from large fathers, and more daughters with sperm from smaller fathers. The researchers believe that the lizards do this to ensure that the genes from large fathers are passed on to sons, who stand to benefit from inheriting the genes for large size.

Two species of damselfish may look identical—not to mention drab—to the human eye. But that's because, in comparison to the fish, all of us are essentially colorblind. A new study published online on February 25th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, reveals that the fish can easily tell one species from another based entirely on the shape of the ultraviolet (UV) patterns on their faces.

A team from the University of Copenhagen, led by postdoc Luke Holman of the Center for Social Evolution, describes in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, published on the 24 February 2010, that ant queens are much more devious than previously thought.

Baby monitors of the future could translate infant cries, so that parents will know for certain whether their child is sleepy, hungry, needing a change, or in pain. Japanese scientists report details of a statistical computer program that can analyze a baby's crying in the International Journal of Biometrics.

A paralyzed patient implanted with a brain-computer interface device has allowed scientists to determine the relationship between brain waves and attention.

A team of paleontologists has discovered a new dinosaur species they're calling Abydosaurus, which belongs to the group of gigantic, long-necked, long-tailed, four-legged, plant-eating dinosaurs such as Brachiosaurus.

Iron containing short nerve branches in the upper beak of birds may serve as a magnetometer to measure the vector of the Earth magnetic field (intensity and inclination) and not only as a magnetic compass, which shows the direction of the magnetic field lines. Already several years ago, the Frankfurt neurobiologists Dr.Gerta Fleissner and her husband Prof. Dr. Günther Fleissner have discovered these structures in homing pigeons and have, in close cooperation with the experimental physicist Dr. Gerald Falkenberg (DESY Hamburg), characterized the essential iron oxides."After we had shown the system of dendrites with distinct subcellular iron-containing compartments in homing pigeons, immediately the question was posed whether similar dendritic systems may be found in other bird species, too", as Gerta Fleissner, the principal investigator, comments. Meanwhile they could describe similar candidate structures in the beaks of various avian species. X-Ray-fluorescence measurements at DESY demonstrated that the iron oxides within these nervous dendrites are identical. These findings were published few days ago in the high-ranking interdisciplinary online journal PlosOne.

British Columbia, Canada: DNA recovered from ancient caribou bones reveals a possible link between several small unique caribou herds and a massive volcanic eruption that blanketed much of the Alaskan Yukon territory in a thick layer of ash 1,000 years ago, reports research published today in Molecular Ecology.

New research from scientists in Liverpool has revealed the relationship between agility and vision in mammals. The study, published today in the Journal of Anatomy, sampled 51 species to compare the relationship between agility and vision between frontal eyed species, such as cats, to lateral-eyed mammals such as rabbits, to establish if the positioning of the eyes resulted in limitations to speed and agility.

'Free-stall', untied cattle in small herds produce less milk than cows tied to their stalls but have a higher reproductive performance and suffer less teat injuries and metabolic diseases. Researchers writing in BioMed Central's open access journal Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica compared performance and health within the two stall types in response to a ban on the construction of new tie-stalls.

In order to regulate their body temperature as efficiently as possible, wild female bats switch between two strategies depending on both the ambient temperature and their reproductive status. During pregnancy and lactation, they profit energetically from clustering when temperatures drop. Once they have finished lactating, they use torpor* to a greater extent, to slow their metabolic rate and drop their body temperature right down so that they expend as little energy as possible. These findings by Iris Pretzlaff, from the University of Hamburg in Germany, and colleagues, were just published online in Springer's journal Naturwissenschaften – The Science of Nature.

A biologist at UC San Diego has discovered that honey bees warn their nest mates about dangers they encounter while feeding with a special signal that's akin to a "stop" sign for bees.