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All animals, plants and bacteria run the risk of being infected by specific viruses. For humans, such viruses include the flu virus, for the tobacco plant this is the tobacco mosaic virus and for the intestinal bacterium E. coli this is the enterobacteria phage lambda.
During the course of evolution, these organisms have developed systems to render viruses harmless. Viruses respond by adapting themselves in such a way that they avoid the defence mechanism, to which the bacteria respond in turn. In short, there is a continuous arms race between bacteria and viruses.
Researchers at Wageningen University, together with colleagues from England and the United States, have unravelled a mechanism with which bacteria can defend themselves for a longer period against threatening viruses.

Boys may be more apt than girls to have childhood asthma, but, when compared to girls, they are also more likely to grow out of it in adolescence and have a decreased incidence of asthma in the post-pubertal years. This indicates that there may be a buried mechanism in asthma development, according to a prospective study that analyzed airway responsiveness (AR) in more than 1,000 children with mild to moderate asthma over a period of about nine years.
"We wanted to investigate what was behind the observed sex differences in asthma rates and AR," says lead researcher, Kelan G. Tantisira, M.D., M.P.H., of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School. "This is the first study to prospectively examine the natural history of sex differences in asthma in this manner."

If you live in Spain, you may have felt like some weather occurred on a predictable cycle, even a weekly one. And if you are below a certain age, you may even have been planning your seasonal activities around it your whole life.
You aren't alone. Arturo Sanchez-Lorenzo of the University of Barcelona and colleagues from the University of Girona, the University of Valencia and the University of Augsburg have thought the same thing.
Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, they detail their study of Spain during the 1961–2004 period. To minimize the impact of local variables, they used 13 series from stations placed in different climatological and geographical areas.

Ever since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have wondered why some lineages have diversified more than others. A classical explanation is that a higher rate of diversification reflects increased ecological opportunities that led to a rapid adaptive radiation of a clade. A textbook example is Darwin finches from Galapagos, whose ancestor colonized a competitors-free archipelago and rapidly radiated in 13 species, each one adapted to use the food resources in a different way.
This and other examples have led some to think that the progenitors of the major evolutionary radiations are those that happened to be in the right place and at the right time to take advantage of ecological opportunities.

The next generation of digital audio broadcasting has arrived: ROCK ANTENNE at the Fraunhofer stand (TWF 5.3, Stand 15) at IFA in Berlin will be the world's first radio station to broadcast its program in DAB Surround and mp3 Surround Internet radio.
DAB Surround will lend new quality to digital radio thanks to developments by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen. Researchers there have devised the necessary techniques for processing and compressing the audio data.
The special feature of DAB Surround is that it doesn't require a higher data rate than stereo DAB to achieve this noticeably better sound experience. This is because the new MPEG Surround standard, developed largely by Fraunhofer engineers, compresses the six channels of a surround music track to the extent that they require no more memory than a compressed stereo signal.

Which of the Earth’s species, among bats, bees, fungi, plankton, and primates, are truly irreplaceable?
You will have a chance to decide at this year’s debate hosted by Earthwatch, the international environmental charity, on Thursday, 20th November 20th, 2008 from 7pm–9pm at the Royal Geographical Society, London.
Five scientists, all experts in their field, argue the case for their chosen species. It’s not difficult to name a personal favorite species, whether endearing, exciting, or endangered, but what of the less charismatic species, whose loss would have an immeasurably greater impact on our planet?
The chair for the evening will be television broadcaster and film producer Andrea Catherwood.

As poets, songwriters and authors have described, our memories range from misty water-colored recollections to vividly detailed images of the times of our lives.
Now, a study led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Boston College offers new insights into the specific components of emotional memories, suggesting that sleep plays a key role in determining what we remember – and what we forget.
Reported in the August 2008 issue of the journal Psychological Science, the findings show that a period of slumber helps the brain to selectively preserve and enhance those aspects of a memory that are of greatest emotional resonance, while at the same time diminishing the memory's neutral background details.

What do a tree and the Eiffel Tower have in common?
According to a Duke University engineer, both are optimized for 'flow.' In the case of trees, the flow is of water from the ground throughout the trunk, branches and leaves, and into the air. The Eiffel Tower's flow carries stresses throughout the structure without collapsing under its own weight or being downed by the wind.
For most engineers, the laws governing fluid and solid mechanics like these examples are like oil and water – they just don't mix.
A theory developed by Adrian Bejan, J.A. Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering and colleague Sylvie Lorente, professor of civil engineering at the University of Toulouse, France, explains how these disparate forces can co-exist within the same theory.

An automobile powered by petroleum on the freeway and by electricity in town uses considerably less energy. A hybrid propulsion system that switches over to generator operation when the brakes go on, producing electric current that is temporarily stored in a battery, yields tremendous savings, particularly in urban traffic.
But up to now, hybrid technology has always had a storage problem. Scientists from three Fraunhofer Institutes are developing new storage modules in a project called "Electromobility Fleet Test."
The pilot project was launched by Volkswagen and Germany's Federal Ministry for the Environment BMU together with seven other partners. The Fraunhofer Institutes for Silicon Technology ISIT in Itzehoe, Integrated Circuits IIS in Nuremberg, and Integrated Systems and Device Technology IISB in Erlangen will be pooling their expertise for the next three years. The researchers are developing an energy storage module based on lithium-polymer accumulator technology that is suitable for use in vehicles.

As lithographic materials and strategies come close to fundamental technical limits, increase performance and size could become prohibitively expensive.
Further advances will require a new approach that is both commercially viable and capable of meeting the demanding quality-control standards of the industry.
In a collaborative effort between academic and industry, chemical and biological engineering professors Paul Nealey and Juan de Pablo, and other colleagues from the UW-Madison NSEC partnered with researchers from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies to test a promising new twist on the traditional methods. In the Aug. 15 issue of Science, the team demonstrates a patterning technology that may revolutionize the field, offering performance improvements over existing methods even while reducing the time and cost of manufacturing.

A multidisciplinary team at the University of Reading has developed a robot which is controlled by a biological brain formed from cultured neurons. This cutting edge research is the first step to examine how memories manifest themselves in the brain, and how a brain stores specific pieces of data.
The key aim is that eventually this will lead to a better understanding of development and of diseases and disorders which affect the brain such as Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, stoke and brain injury.
The robot’s biological brain is made up of cultured neurons which are placed onto a multi electrode array (MEA). The MEA is a dish with approximately 60 electrodes which pick up the electrical signals generated by the cells. This is then used to drive the movement of the robot.

U.S. and Swiss scientists have made a breakthrough in understanding how a type of white blood cell called the eosinophil may help the body to fight bacterial infections in the digestive tract, according to research published online this week in Nature Medicine.
Hans-Uwe Simon, from the University of Bern, Switzerland, Gerald J.Gleich, M.D., from the University of Utah School of Medicine, and their colleagues discovered that bacteria can activate eosinophils to release mitochondrial DNA in a catapult-like fashion to create a net that captures and kills bacteria.