The major carriers, UPS, FedEx and DHL get put to the test every year with the Great Package Race, a contest to see which carrier can get a package to a very challenging locale the fastest and in the best condition.

A group of 60 logistics students, led by logistics expert John Bartholdi, a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, sends identical boxes bound for places like Lomé, Togo and Split, Croatia. With no indication that there's a competition underway, each carrier picks up its parcel, and the race begins.

Increasing the testosterone levels of female cancer survivors using testosterone cream did not improve their libido more than a placebo, according to a randomized controlled clinical trial in the May 2 Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Female cancer patients often experience decreased sexual desire, and previous studies have shown an association between testosterone therapy, also called androgen therapy, and increased libido in women with adequate estrogen levels.

Physical alterations of DNA in chromosomes can cause serious diseases such as Down syndrome, Prader-Willi syndrome, or cancer. Likewise, changes to the physiological environment of cells—with drugs or toxins, for example—can alter their metabolic output. To track these processes, scientists need ways to mark genes and their protein products.

Research shows that when soy consumption goes up, weight goes down. A new University of Illinois study may help scientists understand exactly how that weight loss happens.

"We wanted to compare the effects of soy protein hydrolysates and soy peptides with those of leptin because we hypothesized that soy might behave in the body in a similar way. Leptin is a hormone produced in our adipose tissue that interacts with receptors in the brain and signals us that we’re full so we stop eating," said Elvira de Mejia, a U of I assistant professor of food science and human nutrition.

Eating disorders may be overlooked in some groups - boys and some ethnicities - by physicians accustomed to diagnosing the condition in white teenage girls, say researchers at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital and the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The problem is compounded when the sufferers don't display the typical symptoms of disordered eating.

A new study shows that although loss of tropical dry forests occurs in southern Madagascar, there are also large areas of forests regenerating.

The return of forest cover was found to be substantial in the study area, with an overall net increase of 4 % during the period 1993-2000. These dry forests have the highest level of plant endemism (species found only in a particular region) in all of Madagascar and are listed as one of the 200 most important "ecoregions" of the world. The study also shows that the relationship between human population density and deforestation is much more complex than previously thought.

Even though they had the ability to evolve and survive for hundreds of millions of years - since before the time of the dinosaurs and through many climatic regimes - the massive, worldwide decline of amphibians can best be understood by their inability to keep pace with the current rate of global change, a new study suggests.

What would be the opening chapter of the Kamasutra of plant sex?

A good pick would be a description of the numerous ways in which plants arrange their sexual organs: from both sexes in the same flower to sexes separated in different flowers or individuals.

One widespread sexual strategy that remains an evolutionary enigma is the production of both male and bisexual flowers in the same plant, which occurs in approximately 4000 species.

Climate – and not modern humans – was the cause of the Neanderthal extinction in the Iberian Peninsula. Such is the conclusion of the University of Granada research group RNM 179 - Mineralogy and Geochemistry of sedimentary and metamorphic environments, headed by professor Miguel Ortega Huertas and whose members Francisco José Jiménez Espejo, Francisca Martínez Ruiz and David Gallego Torres work jointly at the department of Mineralogy and Petrology of the University of Granada and the Andalusian Regional Institute of Earth Sciences (CSIC-UGR).

Last fall I had a chance to hear a presentation by Doug Berg, a microbiologist here at Washington University. Berg's work is a great combination of new technology, genomics and evolution, and it happens to also have potential medical relevance. He's studying the evolution of drug resistance in Helicobacter pylori, a usually benign bacterium that is responsible for stomach ulcers. (Recall that the Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded in 2005 to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren for their discovery of the link between H.