Fungi don't have sexes, they have mating types, but a new study in PLoS says there are similarities between the parts of DNA that determine the sex of plants and animals and the parts of DNA that determine mating types in certain fungi.

It makes fungi interesting as new model organisms in studies of the evolutionary development of sex chromosomes.

In the plant and animal kingdoms there are individuals of different sexes, that is, bearers of either many tiny sex cells (males) or a few large ones (females). In the third eukaryote kingdom (organisms with DNA gathered in the cell nucleus), the fungi kingdom, there are no sexes but rather a simpler and more primitive system of different so-called mating types. These are distinguished by different variants of a few specific genes.

If you're a student of culture, a number of things have likely piqued your curiosity; like why so many modern people get drunk about ancient religous stuff.

Take Mardi Gras, for example - go to any Mardi Gras celebration and 98% of people there will be Protestants, so they haven't fasted for Lent in over 400 years, and 85% won't know why they are getting drunk at all, but they still act like they are getting ready to starve for 40 days - if by starving we mean not having yards of beer for 11 straight hours.  It's a real mystery but at least it gets people thinking about religion and its relationship to Brazilian strippers.

Stegography is an ancient technique of hiding data within data. Unlike encryption, it isn't obviously encrypted. Today it is used to take advantage of unused bits of data in images or audio/video files to transmit secrets.

The basic concept of understanding the hidden data in files can also be used in understanding computer networks and biology, says Weixiong Zhang, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of computer science. He and his co-authors writing in Physical Review E say they have created an algorithm to automatically discover communities and their subtle structures in various networks, including biological ones. They used it to identify the community structure of a network of co-expressed genes involved in bacterial sepsis.

Crop scientists have cloned a gene that controls the shape of tomatoes, a discovery that could help unravel the mystery behind the huge morphological differences among edible fruits and vegetables, as well as provide new insight into mechanisms of plant development.

The gene, dubbed SUN, is only the second ever found to play a significant role in the elongated shape of various tomato varieties, said Esther van der Knaap, lead researcher in the study and assistant professor of horticulture and crop science at Ohio State University’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) in Wooster.

On September 27, 2004, the front part of a baby mammoth’s body was found in Olchan mine in the Oimyakon Region of Yakutia. Specialists of the Museum of Mammoth of the Institute of Applied Ecology of the North, Academy of Sciences of Sakha Republic (Yakutia), have been thoroughly studying the finding and they have published the first results.

The remains were only the head, part of the proboscis, the neck area and part of the breast of the baby mammoth’s body. The body was mostly cut off behind the withers and shoulder area. The skin on the head was torn on the forehead and cinciput, the skull was damaged and the proboscis was torn off. The baby mammoth’s skin was well preserved - smooth, greyish-brown and even the tawny hair had fallen out and frozen into the ice near the body.

Tuberculosis kills two million people per year and so remains a very dangerous disease, though less so in America.

Researchers worldwide have been working to produce efficient tuberculosis vaccines but no one has created something that can ensure complete protection from the disease. The efficacy of one of the most widespread vaccines – BCG – varies from 80% to as little as 0%.

Specialists of the State Research Center for Virology and Biotechnology “Vector” have tested an experimental preparation for tuberculosis vaccinal prevention. The preparation is nontoxic and does not provoke an immune response in mice. Because it has not received all required verifications and approvals it cannot be called a vaccine yet.

I don't often see bacteriophage ecology and evolution papers in the open source literature, but there is a nice one in next month's American Naturalist (occasionally Am Nat selects papers for open access).

Brasilia is the futuristic capitol of Brazil. It has been so since 1960 when the federal government moved there from Rio de Janeiro. I recently spent two days there and it is truly magnificent. It has been a place I have wanted to visit almost my entire life, but more on that later. First it is important to briefly tell the story of its creation as it is all about vision and how vision can project humanity into the future. The population of Brazil, since colonization by the Portuguese, has always been predominately oriented to the Atlantic coast, where the majority of Brazilians still reside. The country is the fifth largest in the world in terms of land mass.

Overexpressing a protein involved in the uptake of fat in muscle of mice can improve their tolerance to cold temperatures, researchers find in a new study that showcases the over-looked role muscle may play in the cold response.

When temperatures drop, mammals respond by generating heat (thermogenesis), through mechanisms like shivering and breaking down ‘brown fat’ (high energy fat cells that are especially prominent in newborns and hibernating animals).

Considering that muscle accounts for over one-third of body mass and muscle activity regulates fat metabolism, Dalan Jensen and colleagues found that increasing the muscle’s ability to use fat for energy had a profound impact on its contribution to thermogenesis.

A study of male attitudes to health and how they use health services challenges the usual stereotype that men are uninterested in their health. The results will surprise those people who envisage the Australian pub-going male as brusque and disinterested in all things medical.

Rather than procrastinating, men may delay going to the doctor so that they can watch a health problem to see if it will fix itself. Indeed, a picture emerges of men as personal health detectives, monitoring rather than ignoring symptoms, and visiting the doctor only if a problem fails to resolve itself.