Between 12 and 14 November 2008, The Centre for Invasion Biology hosted some of the World’s top invasion scientists at its international symposium entitled ‘Fifty Years of Invasion Ecology – The Legacy of Charles Elton’.

Epidemic disease constitutes a substantial threat to the viability of species, especially of endangered, social species. In the latest issue of Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, a group of Chinese scientists together with C·I·B researcher Cang Hui explored the complex dynamics and spatial patterns related to this question.

It is not only history that repeats itself – nature does too. For example, the drainage system of the Okavango Delta in Botswana resembles the veins of a leaf. The phenomena that “in one grain of sand you can see the universe” is termed fractal behavior , or self-similarity and its discovery is credited largely to Benoit Mandelbrot.

Gram for gram, it costs about the same amount to live, whether bacterium or whale. Despite the enormous biological diversity on the planet- from bacteria to elephants, and algae to sapling trees- analysis of over three thousand species suggests that metabolism displays a striking degree of homeostasis across all of life.