In a paper published online in advance in Science this week, Boston University's Horacio Frydman and his colleagues show that "Drosophila mauritiana infected with a native Wolbachia wMau strain produces about four times more eggs than the noninfected counterpart." That's because, Frydman et al. say, "Wolbachia infection leads to an increase in the mitotic activity of germline stem cells as well as a decrease in programmed cell death in the germarium."
Over in this week's issue, Science's Mara Hvistendahl examines "recent efforts to clean up China's academic publishing industry." She says "the country's 4,700 scientific periodicals include a hefty number of what the Chinese press refers to as 'trash journals.'" Hvistendahl says many of these journals now — or soon will — face the chopping block. Cell Research Editor-in-Chief Gang Pei tells Science that "by administrative measures or by market measures ... there will be some kind of cleanup."