Poor Mojo's Newswire

The warning comes in a film Invasion of the Jellyfish to be screened by Channel 5 on Tues February 12.

It focuses on the change in behaviour patterns of jellyfish in the Pacific Ocean off Japan and Australia due to depleted food resources as humans fish the world seas.

But a similar incident happened much closer to home in November 27 off the Northern Ireland coast when a 10 mile wide, 13 metre deep swarm of jellyfish swam attacked the country's only salmon farm, wiping out over 1million worth of stock.

In their book, Culture of Honor, psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen argue that the South is more violent than the North because southern people have culturally acquired beliefs about personal honor that are different from their northern counterparts. Southerners, they argue, believe more strongly than Northerners that a person’s reputation is important and worth defending even at great cost. As a consequence, arguments and confrontations that lead to harsh words or minor scuffles in Amherst or Ann Arbor often escalate to lethal violence in Asheville or Austin.

What else could explain these differences? Some feature of the southern environment, such as its greater warmth, could explain why Southerners are more violent. Such hypotheses are plausible, and Nisbett and Cohen are at pains to test them. Northerners and Southerners might differ genetically, but this hypothesis is not very plausible. The settlers of the North and South came mostly from the British Isles and adjacent areas of northwestern Europe. Human populations are quite well mixed on this scale.

British scientists who had already coaxed male bone marrow cells to develop into primitive sperm cells have now repeated the feat with female embryonic stem cells.

The University of Newcastle team that has achieved the feat is now applying for permission to turn the bone marrow of a woman into sperm which, if successful, would make the method more practical than with embryonic cells.

Levels of insulin and of its receptors diminish significantly in the brain in early Alzheimer's, and continue to fall as the disease progresses, according to research published in the November issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. "Insulin disappears early and dramatically in Alzheimer's disease," senior author Dr Suzanne M de la Monte, a neuropathologist and professor of pathology at Brown Medical School, said in a press release. "And many of the unexplained features of Alzheimer's, such as cell death and tangles in the brain, appear to be linked to abnormalities in insulin signalling. This demonstrates that the disease is most likely a neuroendocrine disorder, or another type of diabetes."