Birds that Kill Snakes

Debunking the viper's strike: harmless snakes kill a common assumption.

To survive, organisms must avoid predation and acquire nutrients and energy. Sensory systems must correctly differentiate between potential predators and prey, and elicit behaviours that adjust distances accordingly. For snakes, strikes can serve both purposes. Vipers are thought to have the fastest strikes among snakes. However, strike performance has been measured in very few species, especia...

How to Kill Two Birds With One Transgenic Pig

Islet transplantation promises to provide safe, longlasting insulin independence to individuals with diabetes. Yet the need for lifelong immunosuppression coupled with a vastly insufficient supply of donor tissue continues to prevent the widespread application of this approach to treating diabetes. A study (1) in this issue of Diabetes describes significant progress in addressing both of these ...

Farmers kill 23 million birds to stop influenza virus.

European health officials are continuing to monitor an outbreak of a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza A (H7N7) that has claimed the life of a Dutch veterinarian and resulted in the slaughter of more than 23 million chickens and other fowl in the Nether-lands and Belgium. Since its discovery at six poultry farms in central Holland on 28 February, the virus has also caused eye infectio...

Single-Cell Analysis: The Differences That Kill

Using single-cell RNA sequencing, Avraham et al. investigate how variability in macrophage response to infection is controlled by variability within the pathogen population. They find that heterogeneous expression of the Salmonella virulence factor PhoP and subsequent cell-wall modifications lead to the bimodal induction of the interferon-response in infected macrophages.

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