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Reports
where infection confers lifelong immunity, cold viruses can vary their surface antigens, allowing repeat infections to occur. Influenza virus pandemics are set off by replication of a new variant of flu genotype, whichevolves from crossover in multiple...
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Serpent solutions
tropical disease” by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2017. It has been estimated that around 5.4 million snakebites occur worldwide every year, resulting in 2.7 million envenomings, leading to around 140,000 deaths and 400,000 permanent...
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A Meaty Mystery
still learning to cope with. For scientists alpha-gal is forcing a remapping of basic tenets of immunology: how allergies occur, how they are triggered, who they put in danger and when. The story of how the allergy was discovered begins with a cancer...
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Crazy horses
a specialised brood pouch on the male's abdomen, which opens just before mating and is firmly closed afterwards. Once mating occurs, the circulating androgen concentration declines rapidly, as the male has to perform a completely different function:...
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Focus on...Allergies
diagnosed with allergic rhinitis and eczema have both trebled over the last 30 years[1]. What is an allergy? Allergies occur when the body treats a harmless substance as a threat and the immune system produces an unnecessary response to it. In...
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What is 'fire melanism'?
encourages the emergence of darker forms that offer better concealment against the pitch-coloured substrate. Melanism – the occurrence of darker colouration due to an increase in a dark pigment called melanin – occurs across the spectrum of animal life....
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When is flying ant day 2024 and why do they appear
summer, flying ants take to the skies – and inadvertently, our gardens, parks, and homes. Previously this has thought to occur on one particular day in the year. However, through studies carried out by the Royal Society of Biology (RSB) led by ecologist...
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Hunting for 'holes of hope'
hailed as a major medical advance. It is then perhaps surprising that antimicrobials with these properties already exist and occur naturally in the environment. Not only have we known about them for over 100 years, they have been used to treat bacterial...
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A dog eat dog world
of spider (Grammonota sp.) and a plant bug (Tytthus sp.), both of which also ate the planthoppers. This motivation can occur in much larger organisms as well. Killer whales (Orcinus orca) squeeze the calorie-rich livers out of great white sharks...
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Cultural revolution
dietary items[2]. Cultural transmission has also been found to pervade all stages of animals’ life cycles. In mammals much occurs within early mother-infant interactions, but later learning from a widening social network can be important – for example,...
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Photography Competition 2020 Winners
up The world is a good place by Charlotte Bean Taken: Brookmans Park, England, UK We tend to focus on the bad changes that occur in the world around us, yet so much positivity can be found if we look in the right places. Here, the young goslings are...
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Pinch point
in the wild. The signal crayfish in particular has become established in large parts of England and Wales, with some occurrences in Scotland. One of the biggest challenges created by the introduced crayfish is their ability to carry diseases,...
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Sombre photo of elephants on giant rubbish dump wins RSB Photography Competition
is a good place Photographer: Charlotte Bean Location: Brookmans Park, England, UK We tend to focus on the bad changes that occur in the world around us, yet so much positivity can be found if we look in the right places. Here, the young goslings are...
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"We're creating landscapes suited to the animals that transmit disease to us"
actually happen? It's a really good question. It was never certain, it wasn’t inevitable, because for an event like this to occur so many things have to line up exactly. But we have been saying that this is a risk.Pandemic flu, which was more likely...
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“There were at least three papers in 2019 that said coronaviruses might be a real problem in south China”
actually happen? It's a really good question. It was never certain, it wasn’t inevitable, because for an event like this to occur so many things have to line up exactly. But we have been saying that this is a risk.Pandemic flu, which was more likely...
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“There were at least three papers in 2019 that said coronaviruses might be a real problem in south China”
actually happen? It's a really good question. It was never certain, it wasn’t inevitable, because for an event like this to occur so many things have to line up exactly. But we have been saying that this is a risk.Pandemic flu, which was more likely...
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Breach of the Peace
vessels travelling in Arctic waters is already increasing (see 'Rising Traffic', below). The bulk of vessel traffic growth occurs during the ice-free months, whichcoincides with the migration of several cetacean species. For example, every year, tens of...
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In the wrong place at the wrong time
within communities are often categorised as native or non-native. Native species are typically regarded as those that occur naturally within a specific geographical area, whereas non-native species are those that have been introduced artificially,...
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Imitating Life
stamens once more. Remarkably, this deformation is completely reversible, with biomechanical tests suggesting that it can occur more than 3,000 times without structural damage. A closer investigation of the flower's structure reveals how it works. The...
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National citizen science survey re-launched in bid to solve starling murmuration mystery
the University of Gloucestershire are again calling on the public to record where and when they see starling murmurations occurring as well as the number of birds involved and the duration of the display. This year, there is a particular focus on...
