Are you a man or a mouse? Genetically, it’s a bit hard to say

‘‘To me, the thing that I found the most interesting is just how similar the mouse and the human are in respect to genes, and gene content and DNA sequences,’’ Neal Copeland, an expert in genetics and genomics at the National Cancer Institute, said.

But the researchers found mice have about 10 % less DNA than humans, mostly because the human genome has a great deal of repetitive sequences, once called ‘‘junk DNA.’’

Humans share 98.7 % of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. Humans and chimps branched off from a common ape-like ancestor 5 million years ago, while humans and mice diverged between 90 million and 100 million years ago. Diet industry grows as Europeans get larger

Europe’s diet food and drink industry can look forward to some fat pay cheques in the next few years as the continent’s consumers get steadily bigger ad more out of shape, a report released on Friday said. Surrounded by media images of the ‘‘ideal body,’’ Europeans will become more conscious of their own shape and will spend more cash on looking slim and trim, the report by independent analyst Datamonitor said.

One-third of western European consumers are overweight and by 2006 that figure will be nearer half, the report said. Germans, Italians and Spaniards will be the fattest, with more than 50 % medically overweight, while 40 % of Britons and French will be too large, it added. Consequently, Russell said that by 2006 the diet food and drinks market would be worth 96 billion euros, against 92.5 billion now.

Dinosaurs travelled in mixed company

Footprints preserved in ancient mud show that dinosaurs sometimes moved in herds of mixed species, perhaps to migrate or to escape predators, British researchers said. Huge plant-eating sauropods known as titanosaurs lumbered alongside smaller, and perhaps nimbler cousins and other species on a muddy tidal plain 163 million years ago, the researchers at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Greenwich found.

The footprints, mixed in with those of the occasional meat-eating dinosaur, all head in the same direction, Julia Day and colleagues wrote in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

‘‘There was this huge coastal plain,’’ Day said. The tracks, some of which go on for 180 metres, must have been laid down between tides, the researchers said. ‘‘This sauropod herd was actually quite a way from vegetation or a food source, which is really interesting because big herbivores like sauropods would need to have been eating all the time,’’ she added. ‘‘That led us to ask why they were so far away from land and vegetation. Possibly, these animals were migrating to different food sources or maybe nesting sites.’’

Drug to reduce eclampsia risk for pregnant women

Magnesium sulphate, a cheap and to all evidence safe anti-convulsant drug, can dramatically protect pregnant women at risk from eclampsia, the Lancet reports. Eclampsia is triggered by a condition, pre-eclampsia, in which the mother-to-be suffers from high blood pressure and high levels of protein in the urine. This causes complications such as fluid retention and can rapidly escalate into convulsions or a coma.

At that point, the foetus’ delivery must be induced, or the pregnancy immediately terminated, to save the mother’s life.

The study, led by the Institute for Health Sciences in Oxford, England, included 10,000 women from 33 countries with pre-eclampsia who were either randomly assigned magnesium sulphate or a dummy treatment. Magnesium sulphate reduced the risk of eclampsia by 58 % and the risk of maternal death during pregnancy by 45 %. The drug proved to be so conclusively successful that the trial was scrapped while it was still in its early stages.

Age of partner raises
female risk of AIDS

Young women in sub-Saharan Africa are more susceptible to HIV infection than men because their partners are often older than they are, researchers said on Friday.

Older men are more likely to have the virus and pass it onto their younger partners, who in turn may infect others when they marry and have children. ‘‘It is perpetuating the disease. Basically it is passing it from one generation to the next,’’ said Dr Simon Gregson of Imperial College. After interviewing 10,000 men and women, the researchers found that while young men under 25 usually had relationships with women their own age or a few years younger, women tended to have partners five to 10 years older than themselves. ‘‘The substantial age difference between female and male sexual partners in Manicaland is the major behavioural determinant of the more rapid rise in HIV prevalence in young women than in men,’’ Gregson said in the study reported in The Lancet.