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.

Peter Little went looking for coordinated changes in expression patterns in 755 genes in mice. He found them, and a whole lot more, as he told the Lorne Genome conference this week.

The annual Lorne conferences begin this weekend. First up, protein structure and function, where we learn the tricks of the bacterial toy trade.

Professor Emeritus Jack Pettigrew has argued for more than two decades that fruit bats are actually flying primates, distant relatives of monkeys, lemurs and us.

Matt Padula is part of a team at UTS that is using de novo peptide sequencing of the proteins and enzymes in a common tick to look for candidate antigens for a potential vaccine against one of Australia's deadliest parasites.