Mars, Venus, Uranus. They're all still planets. So it goes with the human brain and gender. While males and females might sometimes act as though they come from different planets, a new study in flies suggests the brain is largely unisex.

By artificially triggering the neurons responsible for singing —normally a male only activity - researchers have made female flies play their first tune.

Male flies work hard to convince females to mate with them, often by showing a talent such as sticking out one wing and vibrating it to produce sound. Earlier studies had identified the neurons responsible for the male singing behavior but it seemed that females had that circuit too, even though they don’t sing.

The blueprint for the human body is encoded in genes. Gene expression is the process by which those blueprints are converted into proteins that make up the body’s structures and send its signals.

When molecular biologists began analyzing the complete set of human genes (the human genome) in 2001, one surprise was that humans have as few as 30,000 genes when, given their complexity, they should have more than 100,000. How can humans have one-fifth as much genetic material as wheat, for instance, or share one quarter of their genes with fish?

One answer is that humans do more with fewer genes. While genes consist of chains of deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA), they are put into practice by chains of ribonucleic acid chains (RNA), which are modified copies of DNA. Messenger RNA (mRNA) is transported to cellular factories called ribosomes that receive instructions for building proteins by “reading” mRNA templates, a process called translation.

A lot of discussion on emissions revolves around mitigation rather than optimization but researchers at TU Delft have shown that creating an improved aerodynamic shape for truck trailers by mounting sideskirts can lead to a cut in fuel consumption and emissions of up to as much as 15%.

Earlier promising predictions, based on mathematical models and wind tunnel tests have been confirmed during road tests with an adapted trailer. This means that public-private platform PART (Platform for Aerodynamic Road Transport), has produced an application which can immediately be put into production.

It is expected that the cost of fitting aerodynamically-shaped sideskirts will be recouped within two years. Furthermore, the sideskirts can be fitted to approximately half the trucks currently in use in the Netherlands as the skirts can also be retrofitted.

Cracks in buildings that close without external help may seem a little far fetched but we already have a good template in the human body's ability to heal wounds by sending blood platelets to the affected area. In most cases the healing occurs without any need for external coagulants.

The body's natural response to damage was the starting point for the development of self-repairing polymer materials with the ability to recover with minimal external help.

The chemical marks littering the DNA inside our cells have been like trees in front of us - important, but we couldn't see the whole forest so we could study one gene at a time.

New high-throughput DNA sequencing technology has enabled researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies to map the precise position of individual DNA modifications throughout the genome of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, and chart its effect on the activity of any of Arabidopsis’ roughly 26,000 genes.

The Salk study, which appears today in Cell, paints a detailed picture of a dynamic and ever-changing, yet highly controlled, epigenome, the layer of genetic control beyond the regulation inherent in the sequence of the genes themselves.

Female mice can steer clear of inbred males on the basis of their scent alone, according to evidence in Current Biology.

The researchers found that female mice chose to associate with males producing a greater diversity of major urinary proteins (MUPs), even when all else was held equal. An earlier study by the same team had shown that wild mice also rely on MUPs to recognize and avoid mating with their close relatives.

Inbreeding is often avoided in animals because it can lead faulty, otherwise hidden (or recessive) traits to surface in their offspring. Nevertheless, Thom said, inbreeding does sometimes occur.

The National Health Service (NHS), the British government-run hospital system, has begun adopting a reminder service they say helps reduce missed patient appointments and resulting losses in hospital revenue. Called the Managed Appointment Reminder Service (MARS), the system aims to help NHS Trusts slash an estimated £614 million out of their operating costs each year due to patient no-shows.

The MARS service was developed by Island Communications in association with the NHS and mobile messaging partner Mediaburst, and has been successfully piloted at Hull and East Yorkshire Woman and Children's Hospital(1).

The hospital’s Paediatric Outpatients Unit was the first to test the system.

A group of British investigators headed by H. Walach has studied the psychological mechanisms of 'distant healing', a form of spiritual healing, in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome.

409 patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) were randomized from 14 private practices for environmental medicine in Germany and Austria in a two by two factorial design to immediate versus deferred (waiting for 6 months) distant healing.

Half the patients were blinded and half knew their treatment allocation. Patients were treated for 6 months and allocated to groups of 3 healers from a pool of 462 healers in 21 European countries with different healing traditions.

In 1750, Denis Diderot convinced his publisher to support a vast enterprise, the publication of the Encyclopédie gathering all knowledge into one location.

Dozens of writers worked on thousands of articles for more than 15 years to produce the first summary of all human knowledge and, despite the labour and pains of its birth, its entire contents would barely fill one volume of a contemporary encyclopaedia.

Linking communities and information into a virtual digital library is the 21st century version of the Dictionaire Raisonneé. Better, they can be organised around specific topics, creating vast repositories and networks of experts around a single problem. Best of all, it can be done on demand.

The biggest blow-up in the science community about Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" was not over the 20 foot ocean rises but the images of Hurricane Katrina and the implication that global warming had a hand in it.

Scientists at the Carnegie Institution say there may be something to it, though indirectly.

The Earth’s jet streams, the high-altitude bands of fast winds that strongly influence the paths of storms and other weather systems, are shifting — it could be argued that is in response to global warming.