Antifreeze or "ice structuring" proteins - found in some fish, insects, plants, fungi and bacteria - attach to the surface of ice crystals to inhibit their growth and keep the host organism from freezing to death. Scientists have been puzzled, however, about why some ice structuring proteins, such as those found in the spruce budworm, are more active than others.

Scientists at the University of Illinois have conducted a genetic analysis of vespid wasps that revises the vespid family tree and challenges long-held views about how the wasps' social behaviors evolved.

Insects and other flying animals are somehow able to maintain appropriate flying heights and execute controlled takeoffs and landings despite lacking the advantage of sophisticated instrumentation available to human aviators.

It's a mystery why the speed and complexity of evolution appear to increase with time. For example, the fossil record indicates that single-celled life first appeared about 3.5 billion years ago, and it then took about 2.5 billion more years for multi-cellular life to evolve. That leaves just a billion years or so for the evolution of the diverse menagerie of plants, mammals, insects, birds and other species that populate the earth.

Brown University engineers and biologists have joined forces to record the fine details of wing and body movement in bat flight - together with the patterns of air movement that generate lift. Similar measurements have been made in insects and some birds, but this is the first such data for bats, which are highly flexible and maneuverable flyers and a potential model for engineered micro air vehicles.

Loyola biology professor Patricia Dorn, Ph.D., in collaboration with Dawn Wesson, Ph.D., of Tulane University Health Sciences Center and Loyola undergraduate student Leon Perniciaro discovered the first human case of insect-transmitted Chagas parasite in Louisiana and sixth ever in the United States. The discovery was made in July 2006 in a rural area of New Orleans.

Mosquitoes don't mind morning breath. They use the carbon dioxide people exhale as a way to identify a potential food source. But when they bite, they can pass on a number of dangerous infectious diseases, such as malaria, yellow fever, and West Nile encephalitis.