Scientists at the University of Liverpool have found that field mice have evolved a unique way of ensuring faster fertilization, a phenomenon which could explain some cases of infertility in humans.

The team, in collaboration with Charles University, Prague, found that field mice sacrifice some of their immunity protection in favor of a more rapid fertilization process. This occurs due to the absence of a protein, called CD46. Present in both animals and humans, it helps protect the body’s cells from attack by its immune system. Over time, field mice have lost the ability to produce this protein, resulting in instability of a cap-like structure, called the acrosome, present over the head of the sperm.

People love to find things on Mars. Sometimes it's a face, and sometimes it's a really happy face. Other times it's pyramids or even DNA.

This time, it's Bigfoot.

The Mars exploration rover, Spirit, took this picture in late 2007. Launched in June, 2003, Spirit is a solar-powered explorer that is walking along the surface of Mars to see what we can learn about its geological history.

Malaria is a leading killer in Africa and other developing countries, claiming more than 1 million lives each year, most of them children.

A small clinical trial conducted by an international team of researchers in Mali has found that a candidate malaria vaccine was safe and elicited strong immune responses in the 40 Malian adults who received it.

The trial was the first to test this vaccine candidate, which is designed to block the malaria parasite from entering human blood cells, in a malaria-endemic country. Based on these promising results, the research team is now conducting trials of this vaccine in 400 Malian children aged 1 to 6 years.

Researchers at the University of Sheffield writing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B have shown that mothers are choosing to have fewer children in order to give their children the best start in life, but by doing so are going against millenia of human evolution. The research sheds new light on the decline of modern day fertility.

Researchers Duncan Gillespie, Dr Virpi Lummaa and Dr Andrew Russell, all from the University’s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, studied Finnish church records from the 18th and 19th centuries and traced the reproductive histories of 437 women, their 2888 children and 6470 grandchildren.

Cognitive insight, those flashes of brilliance when a mental breakthrough happens, are widely recognized but very little is known about their constituent cognitive components and underlying neural mechanisms. It is also unclear why trying too hard does more harm than good.

In a study published in PLoS ONE, researchers at Goldsmiths College, London, investigated brain rhythms and their dynamics while human volunteers solved verbal problems.

Often, the participants reached a state of mental block and could not progress further.

Electrochemical DNA biosensors are a growing field and a new study published in PLoS Biology shows that the next generation in odor detection technology could involve artifical noses based on DNA.

The study demonstrates a previously unreported property of deoxyribonucleic acid; single-stranded DNA molecules tagged with a fluorescent reporter and dried onto solid surfaces can respond to vapor phase odor pulses in a sequence-selective manner.

In the context of detecting chemicals in either the aqueous or vapor phase, two general biological approaches have emerged. The first relies on individual, highly specific single receptors (sensors), each tuned to detect a single molecular species.