Climate change plus human pressure caused large mammal extinctions in late Pleistocene
...ound with incontrovertible evidence that they were killed by humans in North America, though human artifacts have been found in association with extinct megafauna fossils on all continents, including Africa. Over a period of, at most, 1,500 years, following the appearance of Clovis-style hunters, camels an...Researchers devise potent new tools to curb ivory poaching
...n on ivory trade, African elephants continue to be killed in large numbers for their prized tusks. But a team headed by a University of Washington biologist has devised a new means of determining the geographic origin of ivory that could prove a potent tool in slowing elephant poaching and the illegal ivory...Human chromosome 5 final sequence analysis released to public
... those conserved regions was likely to have either killed the animal or made it less able to reproduce, preventing the mutation from making it to the next generation. So far, nobody has shown what role the conserved regions play. "What this says is that we don't know as much about this conserved stuff as we...Hardy buoys: Texas A&M project predicts oil spill movements
...ru on Feb. 9, 2001, nine Japanese crewmembers were killed and the ship sank in 2,000 feet of water. The Navy developed plans to raise the sunken ship off the sea bottom and transport it to shallower waters, making recovery operations feasible. But the Navy needed Texas A&M's help. "They wanted to borrow two...Researchers identify distinctive signature for metastatic prostate cancer
...d the finding in mice to mean that we had probably killed tumor stem cells responsible for propagating the cancers," said Beachy. "This finding led us to explore the role that the Hedgehog pathway might play in the function of normal progenitor cells." To study the relationship of the Hedgehog pathway to n...Missing genes may help explain why plague bacteria are so deadly
...ble for the bubonic plague, or "Black Death," that killed millions of people in Asia and Europe in the Middle Ages. Most Y. pestis strains are treatable with antibiotics. If left untreated, however, bubonic plague is lethal in 70 percent of the cases, usually with a week; while pulmonary plague, acquired by...... switch that triggers cell death, researchers have killed cells grown in the laboratory from one of the most...elps activate the apoptosis machinery -- it easily killed the cells. In contrast, they found, the same treatment had no effect on normal human fibroblast cell...Veterinarians discover first known case of canine distemper in a wild tiger
..." said Dr. Quigley. In 1994 canine distemper virus killed a third of the lions in the Serengeti. The source of that virus was domestic dogs living with local pastoral communities. In the Russian Far East, canine distemper actively circulates in the domestic animal population, and preliminary studies by Dr. ...Chernobyl study: Risk of thyroid cancer rises with radiation dose
...ctims of the disaster." While about 30 people were killed immediately from the blast, which remains the worst accident of its kind in history, an estimated 5 million people were exposed to the resulting radiation. "Prior to Chernobyl, thyroid cancer in children was practically nonexistent. Today we see doz...Other highlights in the September 1 JNCI
...hesized that glucose-deprived tumor cells could be killed by disrupting this pathway. Kazuo Shin-ya, Ph.D., of the University of Tokyo, and colleagues investigated the effect of versipelostatin on the unfolded protein response in human tumor cells and in a mouse tumor model. The drug inhibited expression of...One-hundred-fifty year old lessons of John Snow still relevant today
...sten the end of a deadly cholera epidemic that had killed hundreds of people. What Snow correctly suspected was that the water coming from that pump was carrying particles or what he called "special animal poisons" that caused the disease, an idea scoffed at by most of the medical community of that time, ...Critically endangered monkey species plummets more than 50 percent since 1994
.... Surprisingly, the monkeys are more likely to be killed within protected areas, since they are more densely forested and poachers are more difficult to spot. Since unprotected areas in northern Vietnam tend to have less wildlife, poachers often avoid them and regard them as less profitable, allowing the f...Images reveal how rotavirus - leading cause of diarrhea - enters cells
...nes made from live viruses (such as RotaShield) or killed viruses can present safety concerns and be unstable without refrigeration. In contrast, the "head" of the VP4 protein is very stable at room temperature and easy and relatively cheap to produce, Dormitzer says; he believes the same is true of the "b...Counting foxes before the last tally-ho
...ed by habitat features than by the number of foxes killed by people. This suggests that there is no reason t...guments by the hunting lobby that foxes need to be killed to prevent a population explosision. It will also allow us to monitor the impact of a ban on this cr...Ecologists help keep death off the roads
Far fewer animals would be killed on the roads if planners took the findings of new ... roads, and hence where they are most likely to be killed by vehicles. Researchers from Madrid University found that 70% of collisions occurred on just 7.7% ...Researchers look into components of RNA silencing machinery
.... But what our research has shown is that, when we killed these RNA silencing machinery soldiers, someone else is still turning the lights off! We don't know who did it, but we're on our way to find out." "What we have shown," Aramayo says, "is that cells have evolved more than one way to do the sam...West Nile takes its toll on rare bird
...of females. West Nile virus was confirmed to have killed 18 individuals whose carcases could be relocated. Serum from 112 sage-grouse collected after the outbreak show that none had antibodies, suggesting that they lack resistance. "When we tested individual sage grouse after the outbreak of the vi...UCSD biologists discover cell's defense mechanism against class of disease-causing bacterial toxins
...he roundworm C. elegans and other nematodes can be killed or made seriously ill by a pore-forming toxin known as Cry5B. That toxin is produced by Bacillus thuringiensis, the bacterium commonly known as Bt, which is used by organic farmers as a natural pesticide to control insect pests on crops. Although Cr...Asian bird flu became highly pathogenic through continued circulation and gene swapping
...has caused three major outbreaks among poultry and killed several people in East Asia over the past seven years arose through a series of genetic reassortment events with other viruses. This study finding, by scientists from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, the People's Republic of China, China's Spec......d to sweet and to bitter foods, Scott and her team killed individual taste neurons by inserting genes that p...specific to salt or sour. Once the researchers had killed a taste neuron, they tested whether the altered flies could taste bitter or sweet. The typical test ...