Air pollution and cramped housing conditions in Athens, Greece, are creating a new breed of mosquitoes which are bigger, faster, and can smell humans from farther away. The super insects have color vision and detect humans from 25-30 meters, which is about 50% farther than the ordinary mosquitoe. Beating their wing 500 times a second provides them with extra speed, and the larger bodies (by 0.3ug) presumably allow larger bloodsucking capacity.

Cockroaches govern themselves in a very simple democracy where each insect has equal standing and group consultations precede decisions that affect the entire group, indicates a new study.

The research determined that cockroach decision-making follows a predictable pattern that could explain group dynamics of other insects and animals, such as ants, spiders, fish and even cows.

Halloy tested cockroach group behavior by placing the insects in a dish that contained three shelters. The test was to see how the cockroaches would divide themselves into the shelters.

After much "consultation," through antenna probing, touching and more, the cockroaches divided themselves up perfectly within the shelters. For example, if 50 insects were placed in a dish with three shelters, each with a capacity for 40 bugs, 25 roaches huddled together in the first shelter, 25 gathered in the second shelter, and the third was left vacant.

On March 9, world-renowned environmentalist Professor Norman Myers will deliver a lecture at Macquarie University in Sydney, announcing the beginnings of the largest mass extinction in 65 million years and discussing what can be done to prevent it.

Myers argues that we are destroying the Earth's biodiversity so rapidly that we are witnessing the opening phase of a mass extinction of species, one of only six such events in the Earth’s entire history.

In the late 1980s, Myers controversially estimated the rate of species extinction to be 50 species per day, compared to the "natural" extinction rate of roughly one species every 3-5 years. Although his findings were severely criticised at first, most scientists have eventually come to accept them.

As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg's host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach's mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain.

She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash.

The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside.

Bats could be responsible for spreading Ebola among human and ape populations in central Africa, scientists have claimed in Nature. Three species, all of which "had a geographical range that included regions where human outbreaks of Ebola had occurred", did not show any signs of infection, but offered "genetic evidence or an immune response" as signs of their guilt.

The research, carried out by the International Center for Medical Research in Franceville, Gabon, involved capturing more than 1,000 bats in Ebola-infected areas between 2001 and 2003. Team member Eric Leroy told Nature: "We find evidence of asymptomatic infection by Ebola virus in three species of fruit bat, indicating that these animals may be acting as a reservoir for this deadly virus."

Ebola kills between 50 and 90 per cent of victims, depending on the strain. According to the WHO, it is characterised by "sudden onset of fever, intense weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat... often followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, rash, impaired kidney and liver function, and in some cases, both internal and external bleeding."

Thousands of aging turbines stud the brown rolling hills of the Altamont Pass on I-580 east of San Francisco Bay, a testament to one of the nation's oldest and best-known experiments in green energy.

Next month, hundreds of those blades will spin to a stop, in what appears to be a wind-energy first: Facing legal threats from environmentalists, the operators of the Altamont wind farm have agreed to shut down half of their windmills for two months starting Nov. 1; in January, they will be restarted and the other half will be shut down for two months.

Though the Altamont Pass is known for its strong winds, it also lies on an important bird-migration route, and its grass-covered hills provide food for several types of raptors. "It's the worst possible place to put a wind farm," said Jeff Miller, a wildlife advocate at the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. "It's responsible for an astronomical level of bird kills."

The chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, Sir John Lawton, has called climate change deniers in the US "loonies", and says global warming is to blame for the increasingly strong hurricanes being spawned in the Atlantic.

Lawton said that with two such large storms hitting the Gulf coast in such quick succession, the Bush administration should re-evaluate its position on climate change. He said if the "extreme sceptics" in the US could be persuaded to change their minds, that would be "a valuable outcome [of] a horrible mess".

"There are a group of people in various parts of the world ... who simply don't want to accept human activities can change climate and are changing the climate. I'd liken them to the people who denied that smoking causes lung cancer."

A parasitic worm that makes the grasshopper it invades jump into water and commit suicide does so by chemically influencing its brain, a study of the insects’ proteins reveal.

The parasitic Nematomorph hairworm (Spinochordodes tellinii) develops inside land-dwelling grasshoppers and crickets until the time comes for the worm to transform into an aquatic adult. Somehow mature hairworms brainwash their hosts into behaving in way they never usually would – causing them to seek out and plunge into water.

Once in the water the mature hairworms – which are three to four times longer that their hosts when extended – emerge and swim away to find a mate, leaving their host dead or dying in the water. David Biron, one of the study team at IRD in Montpellier, France, notes that other parasites can also manipulate their hosts' behaviour: "'Enslaver' fungi make their insect hosts die perched in a position that favours the dispersal of spores by the wind, for example."

A photo of two peculiar dragon-shaped objects taken from a plane flying over Tibet's Himalayas piqued many users' interest when displayed on a Chinese website. The photographer is an amateur.

On June 22, 2004, the photographer went to Tibet's Amdo region to attend the Qinghai-to-Xizang Railroad laying ceremony, and then took a plane from Lhasa to fly back inland. When flying over the Himalayas, he accidentally caught these two "dragons" in a picture that he took. He called these two objects "the Tibet dragons."

Looking at the photo, these two objects appear to have the characteristics of crawling creatures: The bodies seem to be covered by scales, the backs have spine-like protuberances, and also they have gradually thinning rear ends. Although the photo caught only a portion of the entire scene, it was sufficient to create the appearance of two gigantic dragons flying in the clouds.

Fishermen in northern Thailand have netted a fish as big as a grizzly bear, a 646-pound Mekong giant catfish, the heaviest recorded since Thai officials started keeping records in 1981. The behemoth was caught in the Mekong River and may be the largest freshwater fish ever found.

The fish was caught and eaten in a remote village in Thailand along the Mekong River, home to more species of giant fish than any other river. Local environmentalists and government officials negotiated to release the record-breaking animal so it could continue its spawning migration in the far north of Thailand, near the borders of Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and China - also known as the "Golden Triangle"). But the fish, an adult male, later died.