Warning to preserve 'unique' red squirrel from extinction
..., where many squirrels were found to resemble 18th century descriptions of the species. Red squirrels came to Britain during the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. They colonised the UK from the European mainland, as forest cover followed the retreat of the ice sheets. Researcher Dr Peter Lurz said: "Our resear...Tips from the Journals of the American Society for Microbiology
...vans hut --were built in Antarctica the early 20th century and were used to shelter men and equipment for several years during scientific investigations and explorations in the South Pole region. These huts, now international historic sites, have begun to exhibit wood degradation over the past several decad...Cross-species comparison reveals shared features between tumorigenesis and organogenesis
...tigators such as Lobstein and Cohnheim in the 19th century that tumorigenesis recapitulates aspects of development," Rowitch said. Kohane and Rowitch's research is important for two reasons. Firstly, this novel method provides a generalizable framework within which gene expression in development and tumori...Mathematical rule said to be widely and wrongly used to forecast future beach erosion
... development has "unfortunately coincided with the century of accelerated global sea level rise," it added. That coincidence "means that the prediction of the future rate of shoreline retreat has become a major societal priority."...MGH study finds female mammals produce egg cells into adulthood
...f a fixed pool of oocytes, first asserted almost a century ago, has been so widely accepted that he is not aware of any studies over the past 50 years that have questioned its accuracy. "The ovaries visibly lose healthy follicles throughout life, while the testes continue to look the same. It was assumed t...UN study shows environmental consequences from ongoing boom in personal computer sales
...agine life without one of these indispensable 21st century tools," said Eric Williams, the UNU scientist who leads the Information Society and Environment Issues project and Ruediger Kuehr, who co-edited the book . "But it is exactly because they have become so ubiquitous that we must be aware of the negativ...Paleofire database puts fire-scar and charcoal data online
...ey also found how fire suppression during the last century limited the surface fires that consumed small trees and logs in U.S. forests. "We may be seeing the fuel dam bursting," Swetnam said. "We had other dry years during the 20th century, but we haven't had fires this big. The 2002 fire season broke all r...Stanford study questions identity of alleged Romanov bones
...of the most riveting detective stories of the last century supposedly ended in 1998, when the Russian government declared that bones excavated from a Siberian mass grave seven years earlier indeed belonged to the Romanovs, Russia's last royal family, who were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918. A new study, ...Should publicly funded research be free and available to the public?
... VANTAGE POINT BY DONALD KENNEDY For more than a century and a half, groups of scientists have formed organizations and started journals for the primary purpose of presenting the results of their work to one another and to a larger community of interested readers. That's why the journal Science was estab...Teens and young adults the new frontier in cancer says US cancer specialist
...mong 15 to 29-year-olds over the last quarter of a century was striking, especially relative to the 39-46% in...are better off today than they were a quarter of a century ago." Professor Bleyer said he was delighted that the Teenage Cancer Trust was one of the leading or...DFG establishes 14 new research units
... concept of the Enlightenment movement in the 18th century with a historical concept of its resistances and alternatives and, through an analysis of its interactions, to arrive at a differentiated image of the Enlightenment by using central figures and texts. Natural Sciences The Sahara is the largest dese...The ecological equivalent of Ellis Island: from ancestry to biodiversity
For many ecologists, the start of the 21st century was bewildering due to a book by Steve Hubbell. Hubbell claimed that many patterns in nature could be explained by a simple theory stating that all species are equivalent in competition for resources. In a letter to Ecology Letters, Rampal Etienne a...Life in the universe takes orders from space
A century ago, when biologists used to talk about the primor...ding to Pizzarello, it has been known for the last century that there are large amounts of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen - the so-called biogenic elements - in...Symposium examines the growing influence of aerosols on climate
...tists will look back at the early part of the 21st century and regard it as a fundamental stage in understanding the importance of the effects of aerosols on Earth's climate. In fact, it was in this time period, they may say, that aerosols were first found to be as climatologically significant as greenhouse ...Report details growing climate change threat to coral reefs
...the likely impacts of climate change over the next century on coral reef ecosystems around the world. Kleypas and other scientists will discuss the threats to coral reefs at an AAAS session on February 14. Scientists are finding that human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, a primary cau...Century may bring unprecedented climate change to southern hemisphere
The new century may bring hundreds or even thousands of plant and animal extinctions to the Andes Mountains of Peru according to new research by Florida Institute of Technology Paleo-Ecologist Mark Bush. Bush's findings, chronicled in the Feb. 6 issue of the prestig...Astronomers unravel a mystery of the Dark Ages
...ailures and wide-spread starvation among the sixth century population. The timing coincides with the Justinian Plague, widely believed to be the first appearance of the Black Death in Europe. It is possible that the plague was so rampant and took hold so quickly because the population was already weakened by...Microbial biofilm yields community genomes, metabolic clues
...y, the mine,which shut down in 1963 after nearly a century ofoperations, created the most acidic mine drainage in theworld, discharging-on average-a ton of toxic metals everyday into the Upper Sacramento River until remediationefforts began a decade ago. Acid mine drainage remains a significant environmenta...Protein Data Bank receives $30 million grant
...p unlock the secrets of biological systems in 21st century medical and pharmaceutical research." The structures archived in the PDB represent an increasingly large fraction of all the molecules of life ones that will interact with new drugs being designed. These large molecular structures are determined by...The Lions of Tsavo: Exploring the Legacy of Africa's Notorious Man-eaters
...tterson (no relation to Dr. Patterson) more than a century ago. "Their story offers an opportunity to synthesize the disciplines that comprise natural history and make them accessible and intelligible to the public," Dr. Patterson said. "And that's what The Field Museum is all about." ...