Forget looking for a “gay gene”: fruit flies, the favorite insects of geneticists for a century, need a particular gene to keep the males straight.
A team of scientists led by Manyuan Long at the University of Chicago call it the sphinx gene, and it is present only in fruit flies. Long’s grad student Wen Wang identified the gene back in 2002, and now two other former students, Hongzheng Dai and Ying Chen, have discovered its purpose. When Dai and Chen turned off the gene, the males looked and acted ordinary, at least until they were placed in each other’s company. When that happened, the genetically engineered flies spent 10 times more time pursuing other males than normal fruit flies. Long says that the gene evolved about two million years ago to prevent male flies from inhibiting mating by spending too much time with each other.
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The best way to confront a mosquito problem might be to release millions more mosquitoes — if the new batch of bugs harbors a Trojan Horse to kill future generations.
The mosquitoes in question are prolific carriers of the virus causing dengue fever, which afflicts about 50 million people per year. Malaysia saw more then 30,000 cases and 67 deaths from dengue in 2007, according to the Hong Kong government’s Travel Health Service.
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Australia may save this suffering child
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We’ve all witnessed the tragedy of apple oxidation: Take a crisp, refreshing bite from a ripe Granny Smith, set it down for a minute or two—and when you return the luscious white flesh has been tinted an offending shade of brown. Well, if you thought the Grapple marked the zenith of apple technology, Western Australia has another surprise: apples that don’t turn brown after they’ve been cut.
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Wild bacteria may scoff at our attempts at domination—but in the lab, we’re still in charge. Researchers at Emory University, led by Justin Gallivan, are creating bacteria that will hunt down Atrazine—one of the most widely-used herbicides in the U.S. The chemical has been banned in the E.U., shown to cause birth defects (including hermaphrotization) in frogs and made its way into our groundwater.
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