washingtonpost.com: By Kari Lydersen

When a 1991 cholera outbreak that killed thousands in Peru was traced to plankton blooms fueled by warmer-than-usual coastal waters, linking disease outbreaks to epidemics was a new idea. Now, scientists say, it is a near-certainty that global warming will drive significant increases in waterborne diseases around the world. [ read more ]

technologyreview.com: By Michael Fitzgerald

MIT researchers gauge the progress of malaria using a novel imaging technique.

Bridging physics, engineering, and microbiology, researchers at MIT have measured the frequency at which red blood cells vibrate and have shown that those frequencies reflect the health of the cells. The research could lead to better medical diagnostics. [ read more ]

seedmagazine.com: Feature story (bio tech)by Benjamin Phelan

A growing number of scientists argue that human culture itself has become the foremost agent of biological change.

When the previous generation of life scientists was coming up through the academy, there was a widespread assumption, not always articulated by professors, that human evolution had all but stopped. It had certainly shaped our prehuman ancestors—Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the rest of the ape-men and man-apes in our bushy lineage—but once Homo sapiens developed agriculture and language, it was thought, we stopped changing. It was as though, having achieved its aim by the seventh day, evolution rested. “That was the stereotype that I learned,” says population geneticist and anthropologist Henry Harpending. “We showed up 45,000 years ago and haven’t changed since then.” [ read more ]

technologyreview.com: By Duncan Graham-Rowe

Devices that self-assemble from biological molecules could represent the future of drug delivery.

Scientists in California have created molecular computers that are able to self-assemble out of strips of RNA within living cells. Eventually, such computers could be programmed to manipulate biological functions within the cell, executing different tasks under different conditions. One application could be smart drug delivery systems, says Christina Smolke, who carried out the research with Maung Nyan Win and whose results are published in the latest issue of Science. [ read more ]