'The Casket Letters' is the description of eight letters and a series of poems written in French, alleged by James, Earl of Morton, to have been written by Mary Queen of Scots to the Earl of Bothwell, and to have been found in a silver enamelled box. Other contents were said to be an undated promise in French by Mary to marry Bothwell; and a marriage contract in Scots supposed to have been draf...

In social insects, individuals typically recognize and behave aggressively towards alien conspecifics, thereby maintaining colony integrity. This is presumably achieved via a nestmate recognition system in which cuticular compounds, usually cuticular hydrocarbons (CHC), of genetic and/or environmental origin serve as recognition cues. Most invasive populations of the Argentine ant, Linepithema ...

Mounting evidence implicates ecdysteroids in queen-worker differentiation during the last larval instars of highly social insects. In the present study, we analyzed ecdysteroid titers in queen and worker larvae of the bumblebee Bombus terrestris from the second to the early fourth instar. B. terrestris is of particular interest because caste is already determined in the second instar, presumabl...

Renal Unit, Department of Medicine, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Hong Kong SAR, China. Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Ms. Janet So Ching Li, Renal Unit, Department of Medicine, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, 30 Gascoigne Road, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China. Fax: (+852) 2388-5389; E-mail: [email protected] Prevalence of Cognitive Impairment Among Elderly Chinese Continuous Ambula...

Males usually have little involvement in the dramas of social insect societies, but a newly identified Cardiocondyla ant species has been found to produce long-lived, murderous males, even before the first workers, in a new form of queen-queen competition.

1 MRC Prion Unit, Department of Neurodegenerative Disease, University College London (UCL) Institute of Neurology, UCLH NHS Trust, Queen Square, London, UK 2 National Prion Clinic, National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, UCLH NHS Trust, Queen Square, London, UK 3 Joint Research Office Biostatistics Unit, UCL, and Education Unit, UCL Institute of Neurology, London, UK 4 MRC Clinical Tr...

During the mating season, honeybee males, the drones, gather in congregation areas 10-40 m above ground. When a receptive female, a queen, enters the congregation, drones are attracted to her by queen-produced pheromones and visual cues and attempt to mate with the queen in mid-air. It is still unclear how drones and queens find the congregations. Visual cues on the horizon are most probably us...