Professor Alan Cowman of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute will deliver the Rubbo Oration at this year's Australian Society of Microbiology (ASM) annual meeting, being held in Melbourne next week.

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.

New fish species named after veteran US postman

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.

The elusive molecule responsible for spreading gene silencing through plants is still unknown, but the pioneers of RNAi research at CSIRO Plant Industry are close to tracking it down.

Did the evolution of C4 photosynthesis pathways in grasses helped kick-start modern human evolution as well?

Two of our distant relatives in the genus Homo are believed to have existed together in eastern Africa for almost half a million years.

A new species of extremophiles has been discovered in America's Yellowstone National Park.

The genome of the Eucalyptus tree is to be sequenced.

A French team believes it has identified the ancestral bacterial gene pool for the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex.

Melbourne's Swinburne University of Technology has developed a rapid method for the analysis of microorganisms on CD or DVD which could be used to detect bioterror agents.