Nature wades into the controversy, asking scientists what would really happen if we killed all the mosquitoes:

A stronger argument for keeping mosquitoes might be found if they provide ‘ecosystem services’ — the benefits that humans derive from nature. Evolutionary ecologist Dina Fonseca at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, points as a comparison to the biting midges [...]

I have a vague memory of writing a story back in the 1990s about researchers trying to figure out how to use lethal cone snail venom for medical purposes. Well, EurekAlert says they finally succeeded:

[Chemical & Engineering News] Senior Editor Bethany Halford notes that a sea snails’ saliva contains chemicals that help the slow-moving creatures catch prey.
…
Now scientists [...]

This is more covering-the-coverage than flogging a new discovery, but the New York Times is keeping tabs on the process of turning pond scum into an industrial fuel source:

Foreign genes are being spliced into algae and native genes are being tweaked.

Different strains of algae are pitted against one another in survival-of-the-fittest contests in an effort to accelerate the [...]

There’s a whole shovel-load of politics wrapped up in this New Scientist report on the evolutionary effects of poverty on human reproduction:

There is no reason to view the poor as stupid or in any way different from anyone else, says Daniel Nettle of the University of Newcastle in the UK. All of us are simply human beings, making the [...]

The missile to launch a missile
was almost a secret.
Two male Ph.D.’s were picked
and primed to fill it
and one hundred
carefully counted insects,
three almost new snakes,
coiled in a cube,
exactly fifty fish creatures
in tanks, the necessary files,
twenty bars of food, ten brief cures,
special locks, fourteen white rats,
fourteen black rats, a pouch of dirt,
were all stuffed aboard before
the thing blasted from the desert.

And the [...]

SONG: “nobody else can hear”. (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Super squid sex organ discovered”, BBC News, 7 July 2010, as used in the post Super squid penis.

ABSTRACT: This is sort of filling a request. It could be a song from one marine biologist to another, or a song from [...]

Unfortunately, as NPR reveals, we’re not talking about the kind that’s still safely underground:

The NASA Earth Observatory explains that since ocean waters are never perfectly smooth, the sun’s reflection gets scattered off the surface in many directions. This yields a broad stripe of sunlight across the ocean in most satellite photographs.

But things change when you add oil to [...]

MAPS has published a study confirming that MDMA really does work in treating post-traumatic stress disorder:

Participants treated with a combination of MDMA and psychotherapy saw clinically and statistically significant improvements in their PTSD – over 80% of the trial group no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, stipulated in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental [...]

So New Scientist recommends in a new report on an artificial gut that allows robots to become self-sustaining:

[F]ood-munching robots have been demonstrated in the past, often generating power with the help of microbial fuel cells (MFCs) – bio-electrochemical devices that enlist cultures of bacteria to break down food to generate power. Until now, though, no one had [...]