Viruses and genes interact in a way that may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia significantly - even in a developing fetus, according to an international team which scanned the genomes of hundreds of sick and healthy people to see if there is an interaction between genes and a very common virus, cytomegalovirus, and to see whether the interaction influences the risk of developing schizophrenia.

And it does, they concluded.

Women who have been infected by the virus - around 70 % have - will see a statistically significant increased risk of giving birth to a child who later develops schizophrenia if the child also has the gene variant. This variant is found in 15 percent.

The risk is five times higher than usual.

Who says you can't go home again?  Not evolutionary biology. Well, sort of. There is a supposition with the proper name of "Dollo's law" which states that evolution is unidirectional and irreversible and once an organism has evolved specialized traits, it can't return to the lifestyle of its ancestors. It hasn't really caught on.

In America's modern monolithic science culture, when a desired plan of action is advocated, they call for a 'Manhattan Project of' whatever they are seeking. It's not a great analogy. It reminds people that the last real government science success was 70 years ago and feels rather militant, since the goal of the Manhattan Project was to blow enemies to smithereens.
 

In the current U.S. gun ban debate, both sides are claiming they care about hunters - but it is a dwindling population among Americans and that will cause deer populations to grow out of control, according to new findings in the UK, which has been banning hunting since the days of Robin Hood.

In England, hunting is a pastime only for the wealthy, who can provide two well-known references when they apply with the police and satisfy that they have 'good cause' to possess a gun. The end result is the highest crime levels in the developed world and, as a study by the University of East Anglia (UEA) shows, a runaway deer population problem. 

In Hollywood period pieces, ancient Egypt is disturbingly western-looking actresses rolling out of carpets in magnificent palaces. The reality seems to be different, even for the elites.

Governors and commoners alike suffered from hunger and malnutrition, a whole range of infectious diseases and an extremely high infant mortality rate, according to the Qubbet el-Hawa research project carried out by the University of Jaen, in which anthropologists from the Supreme Council of Antiquities of the Arab Republic of Egypt and the University of Granada sought to separate truth from legend.

How is a 3-year-old better than a computer?  A pre-school child can look at a cartoon of a chicken and know that's a chicken but a computer cannot.  But things are getting better. In the International Journal of Applied Pattern Recognition, a
computer recognition system has been shown to be 99% accurate when identifying different fruits and vegetables, even the particular strain of apples or plums.

A University of Granada researcher has a new hypothesis concerning why bacteria seem to becoming increasingly more resistant to antibiotics.

Bacteria are incredibly versatile - they have been found in some of the most extreme conditions on the planet, and it may be just evolution in action. In this instance,  Mohammed Bakkali, a scientist in the Genetics Department at the Faculty of Science of the UGR,
 believes that bacteria that are non-resistant to antibiotics acquire resistance 'accidentally' because they take up the DNA of others that are resistant, due to the stress to which they are subjected.