Features

It may be only the size of a grain of rice and harmless to humans but the mountain pine beetle is a woodsman's worst nightmare.

Why? Well according to Canadian reports it has infected over 700 million cubic metres of pine forest. Female beetles bore their way into trees eating as they go before laying their eggs; and secrete pheromones that result in mass attacks that can devastate huge swathes of forest [the image above shows the devastation they can cause - the red trees are dead or dying].

2008 has seen particularly damaging infestations, believed to be ten times larger than previous years. Cold weather is what usually keeps the beetles in check, and should bring a halt to this year's attacks, but the forests take decades to recover and a fresh worry is that climate change could limit these cold snaps.

The case of the mountain pine beetle is another example of the often-neglected impact that insect species have on our planet. It's what makes Oxford scientists helping to sequence the first beetle genome or examining butterflies as an 'early warning system' of habitat destruction so important: we'd be wise to pay more attention to the ecological impact of the most diverse group of animals on Earth.

When we do look more closely the results can be surprising. According to Canadian scientists the pine beetle infestation has meant that, due to enormous amount of rotting dead wood, affected forests are actually putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than they are absorbing.

Global climate change is, they believe, at least partly responsible with warmer winters seeing more beetles survive and warmer summers enabling them to breed more successfully. The end result could be a trail of lonesome pine nobody will want to sing about.

The death rate from coronary heart disease could be levelling off or even rising amongst young women after over three decades of decline.

Steven Allender, from Oxford's Division of Public Health and Primary Care, and colleagues report that high levels of smoking, increased obesity and lack of exercise could be contributing to this trend seen in women under the age of 50.

Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the most common cause of death in the UK (100,000 each year) and includes disorders such as heart attacks and angina. It happens when arteries supplying blood to the heart narrow.

The researchers found that (CHD) mortality rates in England and Wales peaked in the 1970s and have been falling ever since: levels are now much lower than throughout most of the last Century

Steven comments: 'We observed that CHD mortality among younger age groups has increased in those born in the early 20th century compared to those born in the late 19th century. This requires further study as the public health implications of a decline in survival from CHD in younger age groups may be stark.'

Better treatment for cystic fibrosis (CF) could be on the cards after a gene therapy breakthrough by Oxford scientists.

The breakthrough involves plasmids, tiny circles of DNA that can carry healthy genes to where they can replace faulty CF genes in the lining of the lung.

Deborah Gill and Stephen Hyde from Oxford's Nuffield Department of Clinical Laboratory Sciences report in Nature Biotechnology that they have developed new versions of plasmids carrying the healthy CF gene that do not produce flu-like symptoms in recipients. They removed the side effect by 'editing out' markers (known as CpG motifs) that are recognised by the human body as 'danger signals', triggering an inflammatory response in the lung.

The team will now look to test the new plasmid as part of the CF Gene Therapy Consortium's clinical programme - which is funded by the Cystic Fibrosis Trust.

Last year Oxford introduced the world to the wonders of 'crowcam': a new way of spying on the behaviour of wild birds using a combination of radio tracking and miniature video cameras. It was the first time that wild birds had been observed in this way and revealed some fascinating insights into the natural behaviour of Caledonian crows.

Now researchers Christian Rutz and Lucas Bluff, of Oxford's Department of Zoology, have created a guide for anyone wanting to follow in their pioneering flight path and video track other wild birds - or indeed mammals and reptiles. Their 'how to' guide is the highlight of this week's Biology Letters and comes complete with helpful diagrams and even an animation to show how the technology works and how it can be used.

Perhaps because the footage from the tiny, tail-mounted cameras isn't as flash as you'll find on nature documentaries I think the scientific importance and usefulness of it was underestimated at the time (despite some very nice coverage - everyone loves crows!). It will be interesting to see how other researchers adapt the technique to take a peek into the wild behaviour of other species. Do salamanders have a secret life? Are hedgehogs and robins as cuddly as everyone thinks? The answers could surprise us and, more importantly, open up new avenues of research.

More details at Oxford's Behavioural Ecology Group

According to research by French and US physicists road networks don't just look like the veins of a leaf: mathematical models show that they grow in a similar way. In fact road networks in all cities are driven by the same simple mechanism in spite of cultural and historical factors.

'Cities are not just the result of rational planning - in the same way that living organisms are not simply what is in their genetic code,' comments co-author Marc Bethelemy of the French Atomic Energy Commission.

Jukka-Pekka Onnela  of Oxford's Department of Physics, tells New Scientist that these results, from a simple mathematical model, agree well with data from real city road networks. He says that using the local efficiency of connections to drive road network growth looks to be a truer fit with reality than using the total cost of travelling across the network: 'Especially given that the time scale of city growth (possibly thousands of years) and the time scale of urban planning (perhaps tens of years) are so clearly different.'

Dr Jukka-Pekka Onnela is a Junior Research Fellow in Complex Systems and Networks Research at Wolfson College