Braving sub-zero temperatures, she has thrown caution — and her clothes — to the wind to tame two beluga whales in a unique and controversial experiment.

Natalia Avseenko, 36, was persuaded to strip naked as marine experts believe belugas do not like to be touched by artificial materials such as diving suits.

The skilled Russian diver took the plunge as the water temperature hit minus 1.5 degrees Centigrade.

check the link below for more text and pictures
Princess of whales: How a naked female scientist tries to tame belugas in the freezing Arctic

IBM researchers created a new type of nanoparticles that are capable of destroying the membrane walls of certain drug-resistant bacteria strains, leaving the cells to harmlessly degrade without any trace. The new system works by using biodegradable plastic to engineer electrically charged nanoparticles that in turn attract to the bacteria’s opposite charge, in turn destroying the membrane walls hence the cell entirely.

Release of Mosquitoes With Suicide Genes Attempt To Eradicate Dengue Fever

Two months ago, in a remote province of Eastern Malaysia, genetically engineered mosquitoes were released into the wild in a two week experiment aiming to see if wild mosquitoes that infect humans with Dengue Fever might eventually be suppressed or eradicated. The 6000 mutant mosquitoes were the biotechnological brainchildren of Luke Alphey, chief scientific officer of the British biotech company, Oxitec. He has pioneered a technique to inject a suicide gene into a wild insect population in a single generation, causing the pest population to dramatically decline in a bug-ocalypse of dead pupae…….

Oxitec’s RIDL technology works by almost the same method that the dinosaurs of Jurassic park were controlled. The term RIDL comes from “Release of Insects carrying a Dominant Lethal”. The idea is to create mosquitoes that have two copies of a dominant suicide gene that causes them to die at a specific life stage unless they get a special chemical. You raise thousands, millions, or billions of mutant male mosquitoes in a mutant mosquito factory, getting them past the suicide stage by giving them the special chemical. In Jurassic park, the dinosaurs were deficient in lysine which had to be a regular part of their dino-chow, while Oxitec’s mosquitoes need the antibiotic tetracycline to turn off their suicide genes.

Then, hypothetically, you release the mutant male factory mosquitoes to mate with the female wild mosquitoes so the next generation of children have one copy of the dominant suicide gene but no access to the special chemical. Hopefully the mosquito population crashes, hopefully Dengue fever stops spreading, and hopefully tropical environments become a bit less dangerous to humans. If it works for Dengue, then it might work for other mosquito born illnesses such as malaria, which infects about 225 million people per year, killing over 700 thousand of them.

Until the 1990s, only two kinds of Orcas were seen in the inshore waters of British Columbia, he says: “resident whales,” which prefer delicacies such as salmon; and “transient whales,” which prefer to eat mammals such as porpoises and seals. The groups co-exist but don’t mix, socialize or mate, he explains.

But when the third kind of Orca appeared off Haida Gwaii on the Queen Charlotte Islands, scientists were puzzled. They were a complete mystery to scientists, particularly their eating habits. Then Ford and his team of scientists made a remarkable discovery: These whales love to eat shark. And that alone might explain the worn-down teeth.

these pictures are amazing:

And then there’s the cane toad: Not only will they regularly have sex with dead bodies, but they’ll even make sweet love to corpses outside of their species. Not just different types of frog, mind you, but animals that in no way could ever be mistaken as a former cane toad: Snakes, lizards, small mammals — the cane toad is a firm believer in the “hole is a hole” attitude, and an even firmer believer in the “if there’s no hole, just make one with your boner” attitude.

and of course the honey badger is #1 on the list, with this awesome video:

comic from november 5th

Dead mice packed with acetaminophen, strapped to pieces of cardboard and dropped from helicopters may help control one of the big headaches for the Pacific island of Guam – the brown tree snake….

Since scientists discovered that the household pain reliever was deadly to the brown tree snakes, they’ve been trying to figure out how to get it to where many of the serpents live in the canopies of the island’s forests, according to a report in Stars & Stripes. The Tylenol-loaded mice are attached to two pieces of cardboard joined by paper streamers that snake exterminators hope will catch on tree branches, providing deadly snacks for snakes at those heights, according to the Stripes report.

Body-clock gene reveals sleep cycles with just a pluck, study says

When the researchers tested the genes in the subjects’ follicles, they found that body-clock gene activity peaked right after a subject had woken up, regardless of whether it was 6 a.m. or 10 a.m.

This suggests that the brain “turns on” the genes at different times of the morning in different people.

Other clock genes followed similar patterns, making it possible to predict “morning people” with just a pluck, the study said.