Streamlined sharks are legendary for their effortless swimming. George Lauder from Harvard University, USA, explains that the fish have long inspired human engineers, but more recently attention has focused on how the fish's remarkable skin boosts swimming. Coated in razor sharp tooth-like scales, called denticles, the skin is thought to behave like the dimples on a golf ball, disturbing the flow of water over the surface to reduce the drag. But something didn't quite sit right with Lauder. 'All of the shark skin studies were done on flat shark skin mimics that were held straight and immovable. But shark skin moves', recalls Lauder. So, when Masters student Johannes Oeffner joined his lab, Lauder suggested that they take a look at the fluid dynamics of shark skin and its analogues to find out how the fish's motion affects fluid flowing over the rough surface. The duo publishes its discovery that shark skin actually generates thrust to give the fish an additional boost in The Journal of Experimental Biology at http://jeb.biologists.org/.

Aging takes its toll on sex appeal and now an international team of researchers led by Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Michigan find that in fruit flies, at least, it even diminishes the come-hither effect of the chemicals of love – pheromones.

Global warming is having an effect on the dive behaviour and search for food of southern elephant seals. Researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association cooperating in a joint study with biologists and oceanographers from the Universities of Pretoria and Cape Town have discovered that the seals dive deeper for food when in warmer water. The scientists attribute this behaviour to the migration of prey to greater depths and now wish to check this theory using a new sensor which registers the feeding of the animals below water.

Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center researchers have again proven that injecting multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) into tumors and heating them with a quick, 30-second laser treatment can kill them.

As oceans warm due to climate change, water layers will mix less and affect the microbes and plankton that pump carbon out of the atmosphere – but researchers say it's still unclear whether these processes will further increase global warming or decrease it.