Nature Hub

  By Michelle Roberts Digital health editor BBC . Edited by -Amal Udawatta, IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES An on-demand, non-hormonal male contraceptive pill may be a real possibility say scientists who have found a cell pathway, or switch, that stops sperm from being able to swim. Tests in mice  suggest it keeps sperm stunned for at least a few hours - long enough to stop them reaching the egg. Many more tests are planned and needed, moving to rabbits before people. The idea is users could pop a pill an hour before sex and keep an eye on the clock for when it wears off. How does it work? Unlike the female contraceptive pill, it does not involve any hormones. Scientists say that is one of the advantages of the approach they are exploring - it will not knock out testosterone and cause any male hormone deficiency side effects. Instead, the "sperm-swim" switch they are targeting is a cellular signalling protein called soluble adenylyl cyclase or sAC. The experimental male pill inhib

  By Helen Briggs & Jeremy Howell, BBC News, Edited by Amal Udawatta, IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES The world is going through its worst-ever outbreak of bird flu. The highly infectious H5N1 strain of the disease is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of wild birds and millions of domestic ones. What is bird flu and how deadly is it? Bird flu is an infectious disease of poultry and wild birds that has been around for a century. It usually flares up in autumn before fading away. "It originated amongst ducks in Europe and Asia, and spread to other birds," says Paul Digard, a professor of virology in the Roslin Institute at Edinburgh University. The H5N1 virus, which is the most prevalent strain now, was first reported in China in 1996 and has broken out sporadically ever since. However, this year the virus has persisted for much longer than usual. The H5N1 strain is deadly and can spread through entire flocks of domestic birds within a matter of days, through b

  By Fergus Walsh Medical editor -BBC Edited by Amal Udawatta, Image caption, Owen Everitt's genetic condition was only diagnosed after many tests Rare genetic disorders will be diagnosed and treated in babies thanks to a project to sequence the complete DNA of 100,000 newborns. It should spare hundreds of families in England months, or years, of anguish waiting to find out why their children are ill. The project is the first time that whole genome sequencing (WGS) has been offered to healthy babies in the NHS. It will screen for around 200 disorders, all of them treatable. The Newborn Genomes Programme, to begin next year, is thought to be the biggest study of its kind in the world. If successful, it could be rolled out across the country. There are  at least 7,000  single gene disorders, most of which develop during early childhood. Every year, several thousand children in the UK are affected by rare genetic diseases, but families often endure years of tests and uncertainty befor