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Like females everywhere, spiders never forget their first romance. A study of spiders shows female wolf spiders will eat strange-looking males that try to mate with them, but spare familiar-looking males. Anthropologist Eileen Hebets says, “The female is using earlier experience that is going to affect her mate choice later. It is reasonable to expect that is a common thing in other animals” (like us).

Maggie Fox writes in abcnews.com that during their courtship, female wolf spiders can mate, run away or to eat their suitors. Sometimes one of them mates and then eats the guy afterwards.
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Scientists never knew how the Egyptians mummified their dead so effectively, but now it’s been discovered they used an extract of the cedar tree. Researcher Ulrich Weser says, “Modern science has finally found the secret of why some mummies can last for thousands of years.”
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House cats and ferrets can get the SARS virus and can probably pass it on to us. This makes sense given that the virus originated with civet cats in China, before it jumped to humans. Disease expert Robert Shope says, “You might want to quarantine the pets as well as the people.”

But housecats didn’t play a direct role in the recent SARS epidemics, despite the fact that infected cats were found in a Hong Kong apartment complex where there was a SARS epidemic last year. “These animals in all likelihood did not play a significant role in spread of (SARS) to humans,” says Dr. Klaus Stohr, the World Health Organization’s chief SARS scientist.
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We’ve written that U.S. scientists are recreating the lethal Spanish Flu, that killed 20-40 million people in 1918. Now we’ve learned that scientists have also created an extremely deadly genetically-engineered form of mousepox, a relative of the smallpox virus. Although it should only be lethal for mice, geneticist Ian Ramshaw says, “I have great concern about doing this in a pox virus that can cross species?You’d hope (it) remains mouse-specific.”
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