Creatures pit their strengths against each other in the arena. Here, they get to fly around, flock together, hunt down enemies, struggle for survival. In the example below, the Docole is pitted against three of the Timude species, which is kind of a long and boring match because the predator is way to dumb to catch any of Timude, and the Timude are way to weak to fight the Docole. What you get is a lot of running around in circles.
Although still a matter of much controversy - it seems like females are reaching puberty sooner than in times past - why? An article from Britain's Daily Mail summarizes some of the hypotheses out there:One is that improved nutrition is a factor, as the onset of puberty is believed to be linked to physical size.
Another theory is that the epidemic of childhood obesity is to blame: heavier girls begin their periods earlier due to an increase of the puberty-triggering hormone leptin, which is stored in fat cells.
"There is a relationship between childhood nutrition and the age that people pass through puberty,' says Mark Bellis, Professor of Public Health at Liverpool's John Moores University.
"Having a calorie-rich diet in childhood, and being obese, brings the age of puberty down."
Modern social conditions have also been touted as a contributory factor - with research suggesting that children from broken homes experience earlier puberty as the stress of a family breakdown alters the balance of growth hormones.
The arrival of a stepfather in the family home produces new and unfamiliar pheromones, chemicals which are believed to hasten the arrival of puberty.
"Single-parent families and divorce cause stress that can also change the age of puberty a little, too," says Mark Bellis.
Early puberty has even been linked to watching too much television - Italian researchers found that children who watched three hours of TV a day produced less of the sleep hormone melatonin, low levels of which play an important role in the timing of puberty.
The content of today's television may also be to blame, with young children subjected to increasingly sexualised programmes from an early age. Research has shown that watching such images produces increased hormones.
Another theory is that exposure to chemicals in the environment - which mimic the effects of hormones - is causing the drop in puberty age and disrupting the normal timing of sexual maturation.
Bisphenol A, a compound that is common byproduct in many plastics. Recent studies have given support to the suspicion that it acts as an "endocrine disruptor" that mimics the effect of the feamle hormone estrogen - signaling breast cells to expres genes that can lead to cancerous growth of breast cells.
As we have started to discuss Genetically Modified Food and its pros and cons, another thing to consider in comparison and contrast is cloned meat.
A new article about when it is best to start children on anti-HIV treatments - and so getting at the questions that came up earlier in the semester in terms of these medications.
A new paper this week details the complex regulatory mechanisms that play a part in keeping stem cells so versatile.
or: link
When bacterial cells are exposed to sunlight, a lot of photoproducts accumulate in DNA, but they manage to replicate in the presence of damaged bases. Crucial genes in this mutagenic response were identified by Dr. Takeshi Kato in 1977 and later shown to be composed of an operon of two genes termed umuD and umuC. After N-terminal peptide of UmuD is cleaved off, the proteins make a complex and bind to damaged portion of DNA, aiding polymerase to circumvent the block. Sequences of messenger RNA, UmuD, and UmuC proteins are played successively
FOXP1 and FOXP2 expression patterns in human fetal brain are strikingly similar to those in the songbird, including localization to subcortical structures that function in sensorimotor integration and the control of skilled, coordinated movement.
 Dr Zavos' cloning work has evoked wide criticism |
US fertility doctor Panos Zavos says he has created a cloned embryo using tissue from dead people.
Experts said such actions would exploit the vulnerability of grieving people who had been bereaved.
And the Royal Society also questioned "a lack of evidence" behind Dr Zavos' claims.
Dr Zavos told a press conference in London he had successfully combined genetic material from three dead people with cow eggs to make embryos that were an identical copy of the deceased. 
Professor Richard Gardner of the Royal Society
He said he took DNA from blood samples from an 11-year-old girl who had died three days earlier in a car crash.
The other corpses whose tissue he took included an18-month-old toddler who had died following surgery, and a 33-year-old man.
Two of the three experiments were successful, creating embryos that Dr Zavos claimed would be "potentially viable" if left to grow in the human womb.
Dr Zavos said he had not done this yet and had stopped the embryos' development at an early stage when cells begin to divide and multiply rapidly.
But he said his current work was a major step forward, showing this could be a way to clone humans in the future.
He said similar studies had been carried out successfully in animals using dead tissue with good results.
He said the animal offspring produced had none of the deformities reported with other cloning methods.
Scepticism
Other scientists condemned Dr Zavos' actions.
Professor Richard Gardner, chair of the UK's Royal Society working group on stem cell research and cloning, said: "The work using human genetic material and cow eggs that Dr Zavos claims to have carried out would not be allowed under British law and is both scientifically questionable and ethically unacceptable.
"It is grossly misleading to suggest that you can replicate a loved one, such as a child lost in a road accident, by producing a cloned person with the same genetic material."
He said it was impossible to evaluate Dr Zavos' claims because his work had not been checked through proper scientific peer review. 
Scientist Dr Panos Zavos
Professor Gardner said: "Even more worrying is that Dr Zavos sees this work as a first step towards human reproductive cloning, which he still appears to want to carry out.
"The scientific community, and society as a whole, should be concerned about this because current evidence shows reproductive cloning is medically unsafe, scientifically unsound and socially unacceptable."
Dr Zavos denied suggestions that his work was unethical and exploited grieving parents.
He said all of the relatives involved knew they were taking part in research and there was no prospect at this stage of them getting new cloned babies.
"I'm not in the business of exploiting anyone. I have never done that. There are sensitivities here that we've dealt with in a professional manner."
He said the aim in the future would be "to replace the child and not to resurrect the child".
Dr Simon Fishel, managing director of the Centres for Assisted Reproduction (CARE) group of fertility clinics, said it was time for a worldwide ban on reproductive cloning.
"This would remove the false hope given by mavericks to patients."
He said using human DNA in a cow's egg would only create confusion rather than understanding of reproductive technology.
"At worst this is misleading and exploitative to the patients funding the research," he said.Victoria Grove wanted to find out if she was destined to develop the form ofemphysema that ran in her family, but she did not want to ask her doctor for the DNA test that would tell her.
She worried that she might not be able to get health insurance, or even a job, if a genetic predisposition showed up in her medical records, especially since treatment for the condition, alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, could cost over $100,000 a year. Instead, Ms. Grove sought out a service that sent a test kit to her home and returned the results directly to her.
Nor did she tell her doctor when the test revealed that she was virtually certain to get it. Knowing that she could sustain permanent lung damage without immediate treatment for her bouts of pneumonia, she made sure to visit her clinic at the first sign of infection.
But then came the day when the nurse who listened to her lungs decided she just had a cold. Ms. Grove begged for a chest X-ray. The nurse did not think it was necessary.
“It was just an ongoing battle with myself,” recalled Ms. Grove, of Woodbury, Minn. “Should I tell them now or wait till I’m sicker?”
The first, much-anticipated benefits of personalized medicine are being lost or diluted for many Americans who are too afraid that genetic information may be used against them to take advantage of its growing availability.
In some cases, doctors say, patients who could make more informed health care decisions if they learned whether they had inherited an elevated risk of diseases like breast andcolon cancer refuse to do so because of the potentially dire economic consequences.
Here's the rest:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/health/24dna.html?ref=health
PARIS (AFP) — Gene sleuths on Sunday announced they had identified more than 10 new genetic links to prostate cancer, two of which would be included in a new diagnostic test aimed at spotting men at risk from this disease.
Prostate cancer is the commonest cancer afflicting men in developed countries and heredity is known to play a key but poorly understood role in it.
Working separately, scientists gathered in three international consortia crunched through genetic data garnered from blood samples provided by thousands of volunteers.
Men with prostate cancer had a strong tendency to have telltale variants in locations on chromosomes 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11 and 19 and the X chromosome for gender, they reported in the latest issue of Nature Genetics.
One of the group of investigators worked in Iceland, trawling over a local DNA treasure trove.
Two of the genetic variants, on the X chromosome and chromosome 2, would be included in a new lab test for prostate cancer, they said.
The new diagnostic tool, called deCODE PrCa, would look for a total of eight such signatures, said deCODE genetics, a biopharmaceutical company that is looking through the Icelandic DNA data in the search for new medical products.
Researcher Gilles Thomas, who took part in a study by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), said that, individually, the genetic variants "play a low-key part" in prostate cancer, but became more dangerous when they accumulated.
"It's being able to spot several variants at one time that we can start helping people who are at high risk," he told AFP.
Men with close relatives who have had prostate cancer are twice as likely to develop the disease as counterparts with no recent family history of this ailment.
But, until now, only a few genes have been associated with the disease, and they account for only a small percentage of potential cases.
Bloomberg News
Couples with the same great-great-grandparents have more children than those who aren't as closely related, according to an Icelandic study.
Married third cousins on average had one more child and two more grandchildren than distantly related couples, according to an analysis of Icelandic families in the last two centuries published in the Feb. 8 issue of the journal Science.
Inbreeding produces children with more birth defects, so the authors said they couldn't explain the biological reason the related couples cousins have more babies. Previous research didn't examine fertility in relatives more distant than third cousins, according to the study by Iceland-based DeCode Genetics, which is developing drugs based on genetics.
"Our assumption was that the more distantly related, the more children a couple would have," said lead study author Kari Stefansson, DeCode's chief executive officer, in a telephone interview. "But nature has its ways of surprising us."
Parents who were second cousins or closer had fewer children than third-cousin couples, the study found.
Stefansson and his co-authors focused on Iceland because the population's education, wealth and status varies little and because most people descended from a few founders. Similar studies in other parts of the world have been difficult to interpret because of the population variables, said the article.
A study last year found that brother and sister fish known as cichlids inbreed so they'll have cooperative relationships raising their young, scientists from the University of Bonn said.
In humans, unrelated parents can have different blood rhesus factors, which can complicate pregnancy and nursing, according to the Mayo Clinic's Web site. Parental kinship decreases the chance for that incompatibility, Stefansson said.
"I found this observation not particularly attractive," Stefansson said. "Though the definition of a species are individuals who are closely enough related to be able to reproduce, the idea that the individuals are related is inherent."
Why is it that some of us (for better or for worse) remember everyone we see, when others of us can't recognize our mother's when we see them? Supposedly we know a little more about that now (article below).
