Bug powder causes male bedbugs to stab each other to death with their penises

Male bedbugs will schtup anything, and when they do, their stabby little penises can do great damage to one another. Female bedbugs have some "down there" armor that absorbs the punishing blows of the bedbug's love-spear, but males lack this protection. A pheromone discovered by a Swedish researcher can cause male bedbugs to kill each other with their penises through uncontrolled shagging.

Previous torture phalluses.

Giant Panda Genome Reveals Why It Eats Shoots and Leaves

The panda genome gives clues to understanding the panda's strict bamboo diet. It turns out that pandas have mutations in two copies of a taste gene called T1R1, which encodes a protein that senses the savory taste of meats, cheeses, broths and other high-protein foods. These mutations may have robbed pandas of the ability to taste meat, pushing them toward their bamboo diet, the researchers suggest.

Pandas possess all the requisite genes for digesting meat, but none of the genes required for digesting bamboo, Wang and colleagues found. The researchers guess that pandas rely entirely on communities of gut microbes for extracting nutrients from bamboo.

Previously.

Super Strength Substance One Step Closer to Human Trials

You may remember Liam Hoekstra, the baby apparently born without the myostatin gene, and similarly enabled animals that have absurd strength. Using gene therapy, NCH scientists were able to get follistatin (a myostatin blocker) to promote phenomenal muscle growth in the quadriceps of macaque monkeys. NCH is now working with the FDA to perform the preliminary steps necessary for a human clinical trial. We could see a superman gene therapy available in the next decade.

Macaques were observed for 15 months after receiving a gene therapy that promoted follistatin (and blocked myostatin) in their quadriceps. There was no observed damage to internal organs, the treatment only seemed to affect skeletal muscle, the reproductive cycles and cells functioned normally, and there was no reported damaged to tendons or ligaments.

The macaques exhibited enhanced muscle growth for 12 weeks after treatment, beyond which muscle mass stabilized. The average circumference of the animals quadriceps increased by 15%. Using electric stimulation (you can't order a monkey to lift weights) scientists were able to observe profound increases in leg strength. One specimen demonstrated a 78% increase over control results.

Along with Muscular Dystrophy treatments, and therapies for muscle loss in old age, the defeat of myostatin could lead to an effective way for all of us to get fit fast. No workouts necessary, eat almost all you want, and have a body like Adonis.

However, if there's one thing I'm sure we DON'T need, it's super-powered Macaques.

Rabbits Milked for Human Protein

Pharming has been milking rabbits experimentally for years, and recently developed a drug called Rhucin from the rabbit milk-derived C1 inhibitor protein. If the drug is approved in Europe, Pharming would start milking a herd of about a thousand rabbits.

The rabbits are milked using mini pumping machines that attach to the female rabbits' teats. The method "can roughly be compared to cow milking, but of course on a smaller scale," de Vries said. And like dairy cows, the rabbits stay relaxed and appear to suffer no discomfort during milking.

Gene Doctors Milk Mice; Yield Human Breast Milk Protein

Thanks to human genes spliced into their genome, the mice are the first genetically modified animals to produce lactoferrin. This human breast milk protein protects babies from viruses and bacteria while the infants' immune systems are still developing.

To milk mice, the research team had to anaesthetize the rodents and use specially adapted pumps fitted to their tiny teats.

Previously, previously.

Cockroach Superpower No. 42: They Don't Need to Pee

To survive in hostile environments, cockroaches rely on their own vermin: Blattabacterium, a microbe that hitched a ride inside roaches 140 million years ago, and hasn't left since. "Blattabacterium can produce all of the essential amino acids, various vitamins, and other required compounds from a limited palette of metabolic substrates," write entomologists in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers have known that cockroaches need the microbes to survive: Kill Blattabacterium with antibiotics, and the insects die. They also knew that roaches store excess nitrogen -- one of life's essential elements, needed to make proteins, amino acids and DNA -- inside their bodies, in tiny deposits of uric acid. But researchers didn't know exactly what became of the uric acid after it was stored, or precisely what Blattabacterium did.

Sequencing the microbe's genome made the links clear. The microbe contains genes that code for enzymes that break down urea and ammonia, the components of uric acid. Other genes instruct the microbe to take the resulting molecules and use them to make amino acids, repair cell walls and membranes, and perform other metabolic tasks.

Blattabacterium also helps free cockroaches from the need to urinate. In humans and other terrestrial animals, otherwise toxic uric acid is diluted with water, then flushed from the body as urine. Cockroaches save that water. Compared to them, the iconic stillsuits worn by the fictional Fremen of Dune would be wasteful.

After months of complaints by European dairy farmers angry over low prices, protesters in Brussels on Monday poured milk onto the streets, hurled eggs and other missiles, and started fires that filled the air with black smoke. Police helicopters hovered overhead as hundreds of tractors - and some cattle -- blockaded the area outside the European Union's headquarters while agriculture ministers met in an emergency meeting.

Previously.

...why, a bus plunge WITH BEES.

A teenager died and more than 20 people were injured when swarms of bees escaped from their hives after the van transporting them crashed into a lorry and overturned on a motorway near the resort of Marmaris, in southern Turkey.

Previously, previously, previously.