Dee Carter and her group have revitalised taxonomy in Australia as well as our understanding of the evolution of the Plasmodium species with the discovery of a long-lost cousin. And they came across it at the bottom of Sydney Harbour.

Australian and New Zealand researchers are part of an international project of mutual interest (and age-old bad jokes) - the sequencing of the sheep genome. The difference for the International Sheep Genomics Consortium is the availability of short-read sequencing technology.

Rightly or wrongly, concerns over GM crops contaminating their non-GM kin have led to a stalemate in progress towards acceptance of GM crops and foods. We look at a new approach using gene silencing and gene imprinting.

The ongoing drama that is debate over the hobbit fossils of Flores has been reignited by a recent paper suggesting H. floresiensis is actually H. sapiens suffering from cretinism. An interesting theory or a 'travesty'?

Strange beasts evolve on islands: flightless bats and birds, amphibious or monstrous lizards, huge tortoises, giant rodents, dwarf elephants and even humans, such as the famous 'hobbit', H. floresiensis.

There is bad news and good news for the owners of ageing human brains.

Andrew French's team at Stemagen in the US claims it has succeeded where all others have so far failed - producing the first cloned human embryo from an adult fibroblast using SCNT.

Almost everywhere humans have gone in their peregrinations around the planet, the world's second most ubiquitous mammal, the black rat, Rattus rattus, has followed.

Graeme O'Neill has been writing about science for almost 30 years and along the way he's developed a couple of favourite stories. One is the evolution of fruit bats, recounted in our last issue, and the other is the role of FOXP2, sometimes called the Chomsky Gene. In a sublime twist, the two stories have merged together.

David Bowtell is investigating the role of BRCA1 and BRCA2 in ovarian cancer.

When the heat is on, boys will be girls, at least among bearded dragons.