With cunning and patience, the ants cut hairs from the stem of the plant they inhabit, and use the tiny fibres to build a spongy platform.

A fierce species of Amazonian ant has been seen building elaborate traps on which hapless prey are stretched like medieval torture victims, before being slowly hacked to pieces, BBC News website reported.
With cunning and patience, Allomerus decemarticulatus worker-ants cut hairs from the stem of the plant they inhabit, and use the tiny fibers to build a spongy snare, Nature magazine reports.
This ingenious feat of engineering has only ever been observed in one other species of related ant, French researchers say.
What the ants do is cut hairs to clear a path under the plant stem, while leaving some hairs standing to form "pillars" on top of which the lethal platform will sit.
Using the plant hairs they have harvested, the ants weave the platform itself, which is bound together and strengthened using a special fungus.
When the ants have completed the chamber they puncture holes all along its surface, each just big enough to poke their heads through.
Then, hundreds of worker ants climb into the chamber and wait for an unfortunate victim.

Is midnight snacking keeping you up late at night and keeping you off your diet? A faulty gene may be to blame, researchers said.
According to Yahoo News, they found that mice with a mutation in a gene called "Clock" controlling circadian rhythms--a member of a class of genes called clock genes--develop symptoms similar to those seen in many overweight people, such as diabetes, high cholesterol and a tendency to gain weight.
Their findings, published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, suggests that a brain system that controls the cycles of sleep and waking may also help regulate appetite and metabolism.
Dr. Fred Turek and colleagues at Northwestern University in Illinois and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute found mice with a mutant version of the Clock gene tended to overeat, become overweight, and have high levels of blood glucose and cholesterol.
Their mutant mice were more active during times when rodents usually sleep. They had unusual levels of leptin and ghrelin, both hormones involved in appetite.
When fed a normal diet, they gained about as much weight as normal mice fed a high-fat diet. When they got fat-laden food, the mutant mice gained even more weight and showed metabolic irregularities.

A group of Indian researchers say combining shock treatment and antipsychotic drugs appears the most effective treatment for severe schizophrenia, United Press International reported.
Dr. Prathap Tharyan, head of psychiatry at Christian Medical College in Tamil Nadu, India, and colleagues analyzed 26 randomized controlled trials involving 1,485 patients in in India, the United States, Thailand, Canada, Hungary and Nigeria, 798 of them treated with electroconvulsive therapy.
Tharyan said that the use of ECT combined with antipsychotics is brings quicker improvement than drug therapy alone in schizophrenics. He said that this speed could save the life of a suicidal patient.
ECT was once commonly used in the United States and other countries but is now restricted to severely ill patients. In the United States, it is not recommended for schizophrenics except for those who are catatonic.

Provigil, a drug used to treat the sudden-sleep disorder narcolepsy, does not affect fatigue experienced by people with multiple sclerosis (MS), Reuters reported.
However, a separate study found that aspirin may be of some benefit. Both studies appeared in the medical journal Neurology.
Two small pilot studies recently showed a positive impact of Provigil, technically known as modafinil, on MS-related fatigue, note Dr. Bruno Stankoff, at Hopital de la Salpetriere in Paris and members of the French Modafinil Study Group, in the first study.
To further investigate, the group randomly assigned 56 patients scoring 45 points or more on a fatigue scale to modafinil, and 59 to an inactive placebo.
Both groups experienced decreased fatigue during the 35-day trial, but change in fatigue scores did not differ significantly between the two groups.
In the second study, Dr. Dean M. Wingerchuk and colleagues point out that some MS patients using aspirin for other purposes report reduced fatigue.
In crossover trial, 30 patients with MS-related fatigue took either aspirin twice daily or placebo for 6 weeks in random order, separated by a 2-week "washout" period.
Average scores on one fatigue scale were lower during aspirin treatment (38.1 versus 42.5), but responses did not differ significantly on two other scales.
Commenting in a related editorial, Drs. Steven R. Schwid of the University of Rochester, New York, and T. Jock Murray of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, observe that "until we make progress in distinguishing fatigue from other MS symptoms, in identifying its mechanisms and in measuring it accurately, we will not make substantial progress in treating this disabling symptom."