A breakthrough announced this week by scientists at the University of Southampton's School of Medicine will lead to greater understanding of noroviruses, the most common cause of non-bacterial gastroenteritis around the world.

Traditionally very little has been known about the biology of noroviruses because of the difficulty in culturing and manipulating these pathogens in the laboratory.

Now the Southampton team, assisted by colleagues at the University of Otago and Washington University Medical School, has devised a system for manipulating the genome of the murine norovirus (MNV) which affects rodents.

The adaptive significance of the unique ability in many primates to distinguish red hues from green ones (i.e., trichromatic color vision) has always enticed debate among evolutionary biologists.

The conventional theory is that primates evolved trichromatic color vision to assist them in foraging, specifically by allowing them to detect red/orange food items from green leaf backgrounds.

Two new studies suggest older men and women taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a class of antidepressants that includes Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft, are prone to increased bone loss.

The jointly released studies by scientists at Oregon Health&Science University, and in San Francisco, Minneapolis, San Diego and Pittsburgh, found that elderly men taking the so-called SSRIs had lower bone mineral density, and that elderly women taking the antidepressants had a higher rate of yearly bone loss.

A new drug delivery method using nano-sized molecules to carry the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin to tumors improves the effectiveness of the drug in mice and increases their survival time, according to a study published online June 26 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

In the past, similar drug carriers have improved targeted delivery of the drugs and reduced toxicity, but they sometimes decreased the drugs’ ability to kill the tumor cells. Using a new drug carrier, Ning Tang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and colleagues compared tumor growth and survival in mice that were given doxorubicin in the nanocarriers or on its own.

Deep coal seams that are not commercially viable for coal production could be used for permanent underground storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) generated by human activities, thus avoiding atmospheric release, according to two studies published in Inderscience's International Journal of Environment and Pollution. An added benefit of storing CO2 in this way is that additional useful methane will be displaced from the coal beds.

Finding ways to store (sequester) the greenhouse gas CO2, indefinitely, is one approach being investigated in efforts to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels and so help combat climate change. CO2 might be pumped into oil wells to extract the last few drops of oil or be placed deep underground in brine aquifers or unmineable coal seams.

Fish use the threat of punishment to keep would-be jumpers in the mating queue firmly in line and the social order stable, a new study led by Australian marine scientists has found.

Their discovery, which has implications for the whole animal kingdom including humans, has been hailed by some of the world’s leading biologists as a “must read” scientific paper and published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B.

Studying small goby fish at Lizard Island on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, Dr Marian Wong and colleagues from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University and, the Biological Station of Donana, Spain, have shown the threat of expulsion from the group acts as a powerful deterrent to keep subordinate fish from challenging tho