It’s only a single cell, but the avian malaria parasite is able to quickly detect when a mosquito bites its host and respond by reproducing faster, according to a new study.

This is part of the parasites’ strategy for surviving seasons with no mosquitoes. The parasites “remain dormant, like bears during the winter,” said Dr. Sylvain Gandon, an evolutionary epidemiologist at Université de Montpellier and an author of the study. “Do nothing, wait for better times. And it’s a problem for the parasites to know when the better times are coming.” The avian malaria parasite shares this survival challenge with human malaria parasites that live in places with a mosquito-free dry season.

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Conor Gearin reports on how doctors can tell when a mole begins to turn cancerous.  Read more at NOVA Next: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/body/doctors-finally-decide-when-a-mole-is-benign-and-when-its-cancer/

One December night my family and my girlfriend both visited me in the small Missouri town where I went to college. As large flakes of snow fell, we walked to the school auditorium, where student jazz combos were giving a concert with a special guest. It’s thrilling to watch student performances, because there’s no guarantee it won’t be a complete disaster. In this case, it was far from that: the bands played perfect covers of “Dear Old Stockholm” and “Caravan.” The horn players launched into deeply felt, unpredictable solos—you could sense both the rigor of years of endless scales in the practice room and the need to prove they could do much more, the desire to surprise. Full Article »

When there are too many deer, it’s easy. You shoot them. Supposing too few natural predators can be found (say, bearded men with rifles), you recruit some more. “State’s Next Hunters Sought; As Deer Season Nears, Experts Wonder if Future Herds Will Be Kept in Check,” a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel headline declared last September.

By some accounts, it’s a good time to be a deer—food is abundant, winters mild, and baby-boomers are growing too old to hunt, says the Journal-Sentinel. New hunters are either too befuddled by the state’s huge volume of regulations or too soft to grab a rifle and thin out the herd. But make no mistake—the American Nordic male hasn’t gone metrosexual. Men will still be gone for the weekend. They simply aren’t shooting enough deer. Full Article »

Class 5 hurricanes, F5 tornadoes, and ferocious wildfires kill people and demolish buildings. But a storm doesn’t need a first name or an appearance on the evening news to wreak havoc on society. Lengthy droughts wreck farmland, and so can downpours that flood the land and wash away precious topsoil.

In short, the far ends of the weather spectrum are not good for human enterprise. So the news out of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Science in August caused some concern for those seeking a little balance. Tony Del Genio and his colleagues created a mathematical simulation of atmosphere and ocean patterns and jacked up the carbon dioxide in the air to twice its pre-industrial level, which scientists expect to reach this century. Full Article »

For the first time, scientists have sequenced a complete individual genome, the full 46 chromosomes that create and maintain a living human being. And they hope to do the same for you someday, but for less than the 70 million dollars it cost this time around.

It was the complete genome of J. Craig Venter, legendary among biologists for chasing genome-sequencing prizes. Unlike previous genomes compiled piecemeal from anonymous volunteers and containing only one chromosome from each of the 23 pairs, Venter’s genome sequence has the DNA code for all 46.
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The psychological impact of ancient religion may have encouraged the rise of large cooperative human societies, according to a study published in the September issue of Psychological Science.
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Christmas in the New York of my childhood was frosted windowpanes and flannel blankets indoors. We would sit, catatonic with joy over new presents and test them out, toy horses galloping across the carpet while parents, smug at their success, snapped photographs or video-taped. One year he tried out a live feed, straight from the camcorder to the television. He turned the camera on me, in all of my eight-year-old glory. Full Article »

In South African caves overlooking the Indian Ocean, anthropologists have found evidence that our ancestors were hosting clambakes and painting themselves with makeup more than 160,000 years ago—the oldest signs of such familiar cultural activities found to date.

An international team of researchers, digging at Pinnacle Point near the southern tip of Africa, has uncovered ancient hearths filled with mollusk shells, pinky-finger-sized stone blades, and powdered pigments likely used for body paint.
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