Natural selection has driven two closely related species of fish in Lake Malawi down different evolutionary paths - even though they live side by side.

An international team of scientists from Canada (Université Laval), the U.K. (University of Hull, Cardiff University) and Spain (Doòana Biological Station), have discovered that a pair of closely related species of East African cichlid fishes – a group of fish whose diversity comprising hundreds of species has puzzled evolutionary biologists for decades – evolved divergent immune gene adaptations which might explain why they do not interbreed, despite their closeness.

A team of researchers investigating cholesterol and lipid transport has performed experiments that cast serious doubt on the dominant hypothesis of how the body rids its cells of "bad" cholesterol (LDL) and increases "good" cholesterol (HDL).

A protein called ABCA1 is critical for producing "good" cholesterol: patients who lack the gene for this protein produce no HDL, and as a result, suffer from heart attacks at an early age. An important question is what ABCA1 does that is so important for producing HDL.

The most popular hypothesis was put forth in 2000 by Giovanna Chimini, Group Leader of a laboratory in the Centre d'Immunologie Marseille-Luminy in France, and colleagues.

Most people understand how liquids freeze as solid crystals when temperatures become cold enough, like water droplets crystallizing into snowflakes or molten glass hardening into solid glass.

Latter 20th-century physicists realized that at low enough temperatures, most liquids that exist in nature become energetically unstable as they solidify. Scientists discovered solids that don't have the commonly known, regular crystalline and glass phases - things like liquid crystals, quasi-crystals and charge-density waves. Charge-density waves are systems that display interesting physics, such as metals becoming insulators.

Research from The University of Nottingham sheds new light on a fascinating phenomenon of the natural world — the ability of some species to reproduce sexually without a partner.

Scientists have been trying to determine how individuals of a key fungus, Aspergillus nidulans, are able to have sex without the need for a partner.

In new findings they reveal that the fungus has evolved to incorporate the two different sexes into the same individual.

In their search for the cellular and molecular causes of multiple sclerosis, an Italian-German research team has identified a subgroup of protective immune cells (suppressor cells) which are strikingly reduced in number in patients with this nervous system disorder.

These suppressor cells are characterized by a specific surface marker, called CD39, and degrade ATP, an energy carrier released from damaged tissues. By this means, suppressor cells appear to be able to curb inflammation occurring in the central nervous system in the course of the disease.

With CD39, Dr. Giovanna Borsellino (Laboratory for Neuroimmunology of the Fondazione Santa Lucia in Rome, Italy) in collaboration with Dr. Olaf Rötzschke and Dr.

By using pulses of light to dramatically accelerate quantum computers, University of Michigan researchers have made strides in technology that could foil national and personal security threats.

It's a leap, they say, that could lead to tougher protections of information and quicker deciphering of hackers' encryption codes.

A new paper on the results of this research, "Coherent Optical Spectroscopy of a Strongly Driven Quantum Dot," appears in the Aug. 17 issue of Science. Duncan Steel, the Robert J. Hiller Professor at Michigan Engineering's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Physics, is one of the lead authors of the paper.