Forests, after all, cool the atmosphere by drinking in carbon dioxide from the air. A new study, however, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that forests' other climatic effects can cancel out their carbon cleaning advantage in some parts of the world. Using a three-dimensional climate model, the research team mimicked full global deforestation and also studied the effects of clear-cutting in different regions of latitude, such as the tropics and boreal zones. Apparently, these natural carbon sinks only do their job effectively in tropical regions; in other areas, they have either no impact or actually contribute to warming the planet. In fact, according to this model, by the year 2100, if all the forests were cut and left to rot, the annual global mean temperature would decrease by more than 0.5 degree Fahrenheit.

Spring is coming early to the western slope of Colorado's Rocky Mountains, providing continuing signs of a warming world, according to a conservation biologist.

"I'm anticipating there'll be some flowering again in April this year, which is something that never used to happen," said David Inouye, a professor at the University of Maryland in College Park.

This will be Inouye's 37th season at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) in Gothic, outside the resort town of Crested Butte.

Dozens of scientists make the annual trek to a meadow at RMBL about 9,500 feet (2,900 meters) above sea level to study everything from wildflowers to marmots.

Many of the studies indicate a warming planet.

In addition to the early flowers, robins return earlier from their wintering grounds, and marmots, chipmunks, and ground squirrels emerge earlier from hibernation than they once did, the scientists say.

UK fungi season now longer in autumn, with an extra fruiting in spring.

Climate change could turn the autumnal fungus foray in Britain into a year-round event, say researchers who have recorded changes in fruiting patterns over the past half-century.

In the autumn, the UK mushroom season has doubled in length, from about 33 days in the 1950s, to nearly 75 days now, they say. Fungi are starting to fruit earlier, and finishing later.

And some species are fruiting in both spring and autumn — a unique development in response to rising temperatures, says Alan Gange of Royal Holloway, University of London. Although it has been shown that climate change is making birds nest and flowers bloom earlier, he knows of nothing else that has added a complete extra breeding season to its life cycle.

In big news for small dogs everywhere, researchers have found a tie that binds the small breeds, from Chihuahua to Pomeranian to Pekingese: they all share the same version of a gene for a growth hormone called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1). A group gathered DNA samples from thousands of dogs representing more than 100 breeds, looking for common genetic denominators amongst the great variety of shapes and sizes. Small breeds, it turns out, all have a piece of DNA that seems to repress the IGF1 gene and hence stunts their growth, researchers report.

Contrary to popular belief, the 'hot spots' of evolution are actually quite cool: a study suggests that new species emerge more frequently in temperate regions than in the tropics.

Scientists had assumed that new species develop faster in the tropics, since they are home to greater species diversity than at higher latitudes. But the researchers behind the new analysis say the explanation for this is that fewer species have gone extinct near the equator.

Jason Weir and Dolph Schluter at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, compared how animal species across the Americas have evolved. They looked at pairs of 'sister species', which share an immediate common ancestor and so are the most closely related species.

The mammal ear is a very precise system for hearing—enabling everything from human appreciation of music to the echolocation of bats. Three tiny bones known as ossicles—the hammer (malleus), anvil (incus) and stirrup (stapes)—work together to propagate sound from the outside world to the tympanic membrane, otherwise known as the eardrum. From there, the sound is transmitted to the brain and informs the listener about pitch, intensity and even location.

But it has been a mystery how this delicate system evolved from the cruder listening organs of our reptilian ancestors. Paleontologists have scoured fossil records in search of signs of how the jawbones of reptiles migrated and became the middle ear of mammals. Now Zhe-Xi Luo of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and his colleagues have found one: Yanoconodon allini, an intermediate between modern mammals and their distant ancestors. "It helps to show a transit

Scientists are using gene chips to monitor the effects of global warming on marine life. It's time to get worried.

Using novel genomic technology, marine biologists have found troubling clues that marine life could be extremely vulnerable to climate change. By mimicking future ocean climes and using gene chips to detect how marine organisms respond, the researchers can evaluate how well different organisms deal with environmental stress. The findings, while still preliminary and incomplete, are worrisome.

At least 20 previously unknown species of sharks and rays have been found during a survey of local fish markets in Indonesia, scientists say.

The five-year study focused on catches from tropical seas around the Southeast Asian country, which encompasses more than 17,000 islands.

So far six of the new species have been described in scientific journals. These include the Bali catshark, the Jimbaran shovelnose ray, and the Hortle's whipray.

Scientists are preparing to describe a further 14 of the species.

In total more than 130 species were sampled between 2001 and 2006 at 11 ports across Indonesia.

The Australian-led team behind the study says their work will provide the first ever detailed description of Indonesia's sharks and rays, including information critical to the marine animals' conservation.

Indonesia has the most diverse ray and shark fauna in the world, said study co-author William White, of the marine research division of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) based in Hobart, Tasmania.

National Geographic also has a photo of one of the newly discovered species of rays.

Some people may be able to smell a good fight. But some male lizards can smell a bad one too, giving the animals clues as to whether to stand their ground or turn tail, a new study suggest.

Male Iberian rock lizards secrete a cholesterol-laden scent from glands in their thighs that signals their fighting ability and social status, according to scientists reporting in the online edition of the journal Biology Letters last month.

The bigger, more dominant the lizard is, the more cholesterol he secretes.

Darwin gave a lot of thought to the strangest creatures on this planet, wondering how they had evolved from less strange ancestors. Whales today might be fish-like warm-blooded beasts with blowholes and flukes, but long ago, Darwin argued, their ancestors were ordinary mammals that walked on land with legs. His suggestion was greeted with shock and disbelief; neverthless, scientists have found bones from ancient walking whales. Humans, Darwin argued, evolved from apes, most likely in Africa where chimpanzees and gorillas are found today. And today scientists have found about twenty different species of hominids, from chimp-like creatures that lived six million years ago to not-quite humans that lived alongside our own species. Darwin also pondered the origins of barnacles, orchids, and many other strange creatures. But for some reason--perhaps thanks to his famously weak stomach--Darwin didn't write a single word about tapeworms. It's a pity, because tapeworms are as strange as animals can get...

These flat, ribbon-like creatures live inside the digestive tracts of vertebrates. The tapeworms that live in humans can get up to sixty feet long. They feed on our food, despite the fact that they have neither a mouth nor a digestive tract. Their bodies are like a kind of inside-out intestine, rippling with finger-like projections that absorb nutrients. Once inside us, tapeworms can live for decades, deftly escaping the notice of the immune system despite their being as long as an anaconda. Some tapeworms have hooks or suckers on their front end ("head" is too generous a term), which they use to anchor themselves in place. They can also swim upstream to meet food coming out of the stomach and drift back down the intestines to feed, releasing chemicals to slow down their host's peristalsis so that they don't get swept away.

Pinpointing the genes involved in cancer will help chart a new course across the complex landscape of human malignancies

"If we wish to learn more about cancer, we must now concentrate on the cellular genome." Nobel laureate Renato Dulbecco penned those words more than 20 years ago in one of the earliest public calls for what would become the Human Genome Project. "We are at a turning point," Dulbecco, a pioneering cancer researcher, declared in 1986 in the journal Science. Discoveries in preceding years had made clear that much of the deranged behavior of cancer cells stemmed from damage to their genes and alterations in their functioning. "We have two options," he wrote. "Either try to discover the genes important in malignancy by a piecemeal approach, or & sequence the whole genome."

Dulbecco and others in the scientific community grasped that sequencing the human genome, though a monumental achievement itself, would mark just the first step of the quest to fully understand the biology of cancer. With the complete sequence of nucleotide bases in normal human DNA in hand, scientists would then need to classify the wide array of human genes according to their function--which in turn could reveal their roles in cancer. Over the span of two decades Dulbecco's vision has moved from pipe dream to reality. Less than three years after the Human Genome Project's completion, the National Institutes of Health has officially launched the pilot stage of an effort to create a comprehensive catalogue of the genomic changes involved in cancer: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).

Monster-size, deep-sea squid that use their glowing arms to blind and stun their prey have been filmed in the wild for the first time, scientists say.

The mysterious creatures were videotaped as they hunted deep in the North Pacific Ocean off southeastern Japan.

The footage shows the animals—Dana octopus squid, or Taningia danae—targeting prey with bright flashes of light emitted from their arms. (See a video of the squid attacking [at the linked site].)

The squid appear to use the tactic to illuminate and stun their victims, writes the team that made the discovery.

Other glowing signals seen from the bioluminescent species may represent a form of communication, possibly for attracting a mate, the researchers add. (See a video of the squid flashing in the darkness as it swims around dangling prey [at the linked site].)

The human-size squid were filmed at depths of 780 to 3,100 feet (240 to 940 meters) off the Ogasawara Islands during a scientific expedition led by Tsunemi Kubodera of the National Science Museum in Tokyo, Japan.

GTC Biotherapeutics is among several companies worldwide perfecting the art of "pharming" -- genetically modifying animals to churn out drugs for disorders like hemophilia and cancer. The first government-approved drug from transgenic animals, GTC's anti-clotting agent ATryn, was approved in Europe late last year, vindicating biotech's years-long quest to steer animal husbandry in entirely new directions.

With the approval of the anti-clotting agent, the drug industry will now likely increase the use of transgenic animals, says Robert Kay, CEO of Origen Therapeutics. Kay predicted drug makers will try to develop several transgenic animal "systems," including mice, rats, goats, cows, pigs, sheep and chickens.

Australian scientists say they have found morsels of fossilized muscle—the oldest vertebrate tissue ever known—in the remains of two fish that lived 380 to 384 million years ago.

Unearthed in western Australia 20 years ago, the specimens belong to two species of an extinct group of primitive, armored fish known as placoderms.

The fish's remarkably well-preserved soft tissues include bundles of muscle cells, blood vessels, and nerve cells. They were found during recent electron microscope scans, the research team reported last week in the British journal Biology Letters.

Fossilized muscle is quite rare, and the new finds are even more exceptional, because they weren't flattened but rather preserved with their three-dimensional shape intact, the researchers say.

The remains shed light on the evolution of placoderms, which ruled the world's oceans, rivers, and lakes for 70 million years until they died out about 360 million years ago.

"On the evolutionary tree, they're the first jawed animal, and we're the last. So they're our first jawed ancestors," said lead study author Kate Trinajstic, a paleontologist at the University of Western Australia.

Layered information holds back protein evolution.

Think your genes have evolved to make the perfect proteins for your body? Think again. Researchers have found that a secondary function of some pieces of DNA has held this evolution in check, slowing the associated genes' progress in becoming 'ideal' protein machines.

As a result, "human proteins may well not be as good as they could be" says Laurence Hurst of the University of Bath, UK, who led the study published in

A French-led marine expedition has discovered thousands of new species of crustaceans and mollusks in waters around the central Philippines.

The discovery was made by the Panglao Marine Biodiversity Project, which has been conducting "an intensive inventory" of the complex coastal ecosystem off Panglao island for the past two years.

Some 80 scientists, students and volunteers from 19 countries took part in the ground-breaking research.

Punxsutawney Phil—the groundhog of Groundhog Day fame—emerged from his stump-shaped shelter this morning and didn't see his shadow, traditionally signaling an early spring.

Sun-worshipping humans might welcome the news, but for groundhogs and other hibernating animals, a longer winter could be a blessing.

A recent trend toward increasingly mild winters is disrupting normal hibernation patterns for many high-latitude and high-elevation species—and in some cases it may be a matter of life or death.

From marmots in the Rocky Mountains to bears in the Moscow Zoo, animals are spending less time napping. The change may be placing some species fatally out of synch with their environment.

When animals hibernate they're able to conserve the energy stored in their fat during periods when food is scarce. So when they are abnormally active, they risk using up their stored energy before they can replace it.

Seasonal plants, including possibly the world's important grains, can adapt relatively quickly to climate change

New research shows that seasonal plants can adapt quickly--even genetically--to changing climate conditions and reveals various mechanisms by which they control their growing response when the weather shifts. The studies suggest, however, that longer-lived plants have a tougher time going with the flow.

Plant evolutionary biologist Steven Franks of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues tested the weedy field mustard, introduced to California from the deserts of Mesopotamia by way of Mediterranean climes roughly 300 years ago. The plant is a survivor, thriving from marshes to near-deserts. The scientists gathered seeds from the plant in 1997, just before a five-year drought struck in 2000. They gathered seeds again, post-drought, in 2004 to see what changes had been wrought.

Magellanic penguins face harm from overfishing.

The Magellanic penguins of Punta Tombo don't tap dance like the cartoon birds from the movie Happy Feet, but they do sing. Each summer, hundreds of thousands of the birds converge on a bit of Patagonian coastline to breed among the desert shrubs. It's the world's largest colony of Magellanic penguins, and all together they raise quite a ruckus.

"They're brayers," says Elizabeth Skewgar, an ecologist who has studied the birds. "The word 'cacophony' comes to mind."

Skewgar, a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle, is worried that a nearby experimental anchovy fishery, approved in 2003, might one day quiet the party at Punta Tombo.

Oily anchovies provide a high-energy meal for penguins, sea lions, dolphins and cormorants, to name but a few. The pivotal role these tiny fish play in the food chain means that depleting their stocks could cause an ecological conundrum that the Magellanic penguins won't be able to dance their way out of.

Even mice brains evolve faster than human brains, and our complexity may be the culprit

The human brain is not a chimp brain. Sure, somewhere between five million and eight million years ago, before the two species diverged, there was no difference. But at this point, despite our bodies weighing only 20 percent more than those of chimps, the human brain weighs 250 percent more and contains 50 percent more neurons. Eight million years notwithstanding, that would seem to be a sign of rapid change.

But a team of researchers from the University of Chicago, as well as from institutes in Taiwan and Japan, says not so fast, at least with regards to the speed at which the human mind has evolved since its split with the chimpanzee.

Satellite images indicate marine life does not deal well with climate change

The web of life in Earth's oceans may rest on a more delicate balance than anyone had imagined. Researchers have discovered that even small rises in water temperatures are stifling photosynthesis by tiny marine organisms. If the warming continues, it could mean major changes for animals that feed on plankton and for global climate itself.

Phytoplankton, the microscopic plants that permeate the oceans, underlie the entire marine food chain. And they remove up to 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year from Earth's atmosphere--as much as all plant life on the planet's surface. That makes plankton a linchpin in keeping atmospheric CO2 under control.

Some animals stand to gain from warming climates, say researchers who have looked at the effect of changing rainfall on mating and sexual selection in grey seals in Scotland.

Sean Twiss, at Durham University, UK, and his colleagues studied the grey seals that mate at the North Rona colony in Scotland.

They found that the reduction in freshwater pools in dry years forced females to wander away from their usual breeding spots, and the watchful eye of their dominant male.

This allowed a greater number of previously unsuccessful males to copulate with them, and decreased the dominant males' access to females. The result is an increase in genetic diversity in these populations of grey seals.

Animal contraceptives are increasingly being used to manage wild populations.

Etosha has had two troubled pregnancies. Her first baby was breached and stillborn. The second was delivered by a dangerous cesarean section. A combination of skill and sheer luck helped her survive the delivery, but the procedure was harrowing enough that her doctor considered putting Etosha on hormonal birth control to prevent additional pregnancies.

It would have been a perfectly routine decision for millions of women. But Etosha is not a woman—she's a South African lion at the San Diego Zoo.

Brown anole lizards on tiny islands in the Bahamas were enjoying the good life, untroubled by a lizard predator found on larger islands nearby.

But all that changed when biologist Jonathan Losos of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, appeared on the scene.

Losos's team experimentally introduced predatory curly-tail lizards onto six islands where the ground-dwelling anoles had been living free of predators, sparking a see-saw year of natural selection.

For the smaller anole lizards, a trait that was advantageous in November—six months after the introduction—had become a liability by May.

Initially the longer-legged anoles were more likely to avoid being eaten, due to their faster running speed.

But as the anoles increasingly sought safety in trees, where the bulky curly-tails could not pursue them, shorter-legged lizards were favored for their superior climbing ability.

Chemicals that seep into our environment may be causing a silent pandemic of brain diseases, researchers claim, impairing brain development, lowering IQs and costing billions of dollars in lost productivity.

A new review paper in The Lancet lists 201 commercially used chemicals that previous studies have shown are neurotoxic to adults. These include pesticides and cleaning products. Philippe Grandjean, at the University of Southern Denmark, and Philip Ladrigan at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, US, argue that it is likely many of these chemicals pose an even greater risk to fetuses and children.

The list represents a small fraction of the 100,000 chemicals used commercially in the US and Europe, most of which have not been tested for their effects on brain development.

Grandjean and Ladrigan say governments should take a close look at their list of chemicals to determine which ones present a particular risk to their populations because, for example, they are very common. They also urge governments to see what can be done to prevent fetuses being exposed to the chemicals.

People who are so-called simultagnosics have a problem with a crease in their brains that links the top and bottom of the parietal lobe. Because of damage to this crease, called the intraparietal sulcus, simultagnosics cannot actively perceive the different properties of an object. If you don't have an actively functioning intraparietal sulcus and you are looking at a red car moving down the street, you can't actively perceive the color and the movement, explains neurobiologist Melina Uncapher of the University of California, Irvine. You can only attend to the color or the movement. And now a new study led by Uncapher has revealed that this crease also plays a pivotal role in tying the separate strands of an event or object into a fully-woven memory.

A haze of atmospheric chemicals similar to those now found on Saturn's giant moon Titan might have been a major source of food for ancient life on Earth, a new study suggests.

Scientists have long been fascinated with Titan, which is shrouded by a murky orange atmosphere of smog-like chemicals created as sunlight interacts with methane high above the surface.

This thick haze completely shrouds Titan, so all you can see in the photographs is orange, said Margaret Tolbert, a chemist at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a study co-author.

Tolbert's team wondered if similar chemicals might have formed in early Earth's atmosphere, which at various times also contained methane. So they mixed methane and carbon dioxide—a major constituent of the Earth's primordial atmosphere—in a reaction chamber and exposed it to simulated sunlight.

Researchers had previously thought that carbon dioxide—which is not present in Titan's atmosphere—would stifle the reactions that produce complex molecules.

Forget Fido. Bats, opossums, and raccoons may have once been man's best friend.

Biologists say the discovery of a new photoreceptor gene in fish, birds, and amphibians implies that humans may have gone through a nocturnal phase in the course of evolution.

The recently discovered gene codes for melanopsin, a pigment that makes cells in the eye responsive to light and helps regulate circadian rhythms. The gene, found in non-mammalian vertebrates, matches the mammalian melanopsin gene. That match led researchers to conclude that a melanopsin gene previously found in frogs is missing from the mammalian genome. The paper, which suggests that mammals may have lost their second melanopsin gene over the course of evolution, was published in the August issue of the journal PLoS Biology.

Mouse study suggests stem-cell work could be made more efficient.

US researchers say they have improved the technique by which stem cells can be coaxed from an embryo without harming it.

The technique has been used only on mouse embryos and is still being refined. But it might improve attempts to make embryonic stem (ES) cell lines without destroying human embryos.

Researchers are keen to create human ES cells because they can give rise to many different tissue types that could help cure diseases. Extracting the cells usually kills the embryo, which some find morally unacceptable.

Mimicking the series of steps by which an embryo develops has led to a significantly more efficient way of creating insulin-secreting cells. A team of researchers reports that by applying a sequence of chemicals to human embryonic stem cells in a culture dish, it has grown layers of cells similar to pancreatic tissue in a young embryo. Such cells may eventually be suitable for treating diabetes.

By all accounts, they shouldn't exist. But two bacteria are beating the odds, living despite the absence of genes considered to be essential for life.

In last week's issue of Science, researchers reported the completion of two genome sequences for two bacterial organisms that have mutually beneficial relationships with their insect hosts. (The bacteria are known as endosymbionts, because they live inside their hosts' cells.) The genomes of both bacteria—Carsonella ruddii and Buchnera aphidicola—are smaller than researchers previously believed possible.

The first known organisms that live totally independently of the sun have been discovered deep in a South African gold mine.

The bacteria exist without the option of photosynthesis by using radioactive uranium to convert water molecules to useable energy. Similar life forms may exist on other planets, experts speculate.

The bacteria live in ancient water trapped in a crack in basalt rock, 3 to 4 kilometres down. Scientists from Princeton University in New Jersey, US, and colleagues analysed water from the fissure after it was penetrated by a narrow exploratory shaft in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. The shaft was then closed.

Animals pick different strategies for survival above and below the sea.

Diving headfirst into a tank of chilly water would cause even the most stoic of us to shiver, but not the hooded seal (Cystophora cristata). Although the plucky marine mammals shiver on cold, dry land, they stop as they plunge into nippy waters — a strategy that probably helps them to conserve oxygen and minimize the brain damage that could result from long dives.

Researchers have spent decades trying to fathom the seemingly impossible diving physiology of seals. The animals, which can spend up to 2 hours underwater in one dive, don't seem to be able to hold enough oxygen to allow them to survive this feat.

Flowers come in an astonishing variety of forms, but all can be classified into two basic shapes: those with radial symmetry, such as the lily, and those with bilateral symmetry, such as the orchid. Studies of fossil flowers and plant genetics have shown that radial symmetry is the ancestral condition, whereas bilateral symmetry has evolved many times independently in various plant families. Yet few researchers have looked into just why natural selection favors bilateral symmetry. Now scientists have caught the evolution of flower shape in action, and they conclude that bilateral symmetry is favored because pollinating insects prefer it.

The battle among paleaoanthropologists over Homo Floresiensis, popularly known as the hobbit, threatens to become an epic of Lord of the Rings proportions.

The debate rages on over whether the fossil, found on the Indonesian island of Flores, is a separate species or simply a modern human with stunted development.

Now Robert Martin at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, US, claims the controversial fossil, discovered in 2004 was really a Stone Age Homo sapiens (modern human) with a mild form of the condition microcephaly. There are more than 400 genetic variants of this disease, which stunts brain development.

For some biologists, punctuated equilibrium is a radical idea. The term was coined in the 1970s to describe an uneven pace of evolution in the fossil record. But because it posits that evolution happens in bursts, punctuated equilibrium goes against the notion that evolution inches forward in tiny steps guided by natural selection. Now evolutionary biologists have shown that evolution in the genome also has fast and slow speeds, and that natural selection isn't always governing genetic change.

Mark Pagel from the University of Reading, U.K., and his colleagues searched for telltale signs of punctuated evolution in a hodgepodge of family trees. They culled DNA data from 122 papers about various plants and animals. For each set of organisms, they used differences in the number of mutations in certain genes to determine where each organism sat in its particular group's tree. In many cases, they examined clusters of closely related organisms, such as tiger beetles or a group of tropical plants called spiral gingers that belong to one genus. But they also looked more broadly, at a family of snails and an order of frogs, for example.

Stem cells might not be the easiest way to clone animals: That's what researchers at the University of Connecticut are saying after they recently cloned mice from fully differentiated blood cells.

Differentiation refers to the process by which young cells take on specialized roles and functions, becoming one particular cell type, such as blood cells or liver cells. Stem cells are undifferentiated and have the potential to turn into one of many different kinds of cells.

This flexibility has traditionally positioned stem cells as more promising tools for cloning than fully differentiated cells.

For the last 10 years, said biologist Jerry Yang, leader of the new research effort, no one could answer the question: Could the cloned animal be produced from one of those differentiated cells? And now we have.

Moles are more than a sometimes unsightly skin growth. Most harbor mutations that can trigger deadly skin cancer--melanoma--and most fair-skinned humans have at least 10 such moles. Yet, only one in 65 of such people will develop melanoma in their lifetimes. And research has now pinpointed how a series of mechanisms prevents the cells that produce pigment--known as melanocytes--from fulfilling any cancerous destiny.

Adult blood cells seem to be easier to reprogramme than stem cells.

By cloning two mice from cells fated never to divide again, researchers in the United States have defied the notion that cloning mammals is easiest from stem cells, or other cells that are still dividing.

In cloning, researchers use a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus of a cell, such as a skin cell, is inserted into an egg stripped of its own nucleus. This process is thought to reprogramme the DNA in the nucleus, effectively overwriting the genetic programme that makes it behave as a skin cell and replacing it with one that can orchestrate the development of an embryo.

Dolly the cloned ewe has been at the center of controversy since she was announced to the world in 1997. Beneath the philosophical considerations, the science of the cloning feat--in particular the type of cell used to kick off the process--has been an issue of some debate. Some have argued that so-called adult stem cells--root cells in most tissue that kick into action to replace damaged tissue--must have been involved. But a new test in mice shows that adult stem cells are actually worse than regular cells for the purposes of cloning with current techniques. Moreover, it delivered two cloned pups from the genetic material contained in fully formed white blood cells.

Cloning relies on a process known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, in which the nucleus of a donor cell is transferred into a fertilized egg that has been emptied of its chromosomes. That egg now contains an exact duplicate of the donor's genome, and if all goes well when it is implanted into a surrogate mother, a clone will result. Xianzhong Yang of the University of Connecticut and Tao Cheng of the University of Pittsburgh as well as a host of colleagues examined the cloning potential of three different types of cells: hematopoietic stem cells, progenitor cells and granulocytes. Each represents a different stage in the differentiation process of blood cells; stem cells can become any kind of blood cell, progenitor cells are already on a particular track and granulocytes are a specific type of white blood cell (further specified as neutrophils).

A continental crash that raised one of the biggest mountain chains in the Earth's history may be responsible for the explosive diversification of animals more than 500 million years ago.

Sediments washed from the mountains – dubbed the Transgondwanan Supermountain – added vital nutrients to the ocean, opening new evolutionary opportunities, says Rick Squire, now at Monash University in Clayton, Victoria, Australia.

The rapid proliferation of animals that occurred at that time is one of evolution's biggest enigmas. Life had remained simple and largely single-celled for nearly three billion years, until the multi-celled Ediacara fauna evolved, 575 million years ago.

Death is the ultimate fate for most bacteria blasted by huge doses of radiation or parched by a severe lack of water. The genetic material irreversibly splinters into hundreds of pieces, dooming the organisms as surely as Humpty Dumpty.

But a few bacteria can resurrect themselves by quickly piecing their DNA back together—a strange ability that has mystified biologists for decades.

Now researchers have figured out how one species of these phoenix-like bacteria can rise from the ashes.

A group led by Miroslav Radman, a molecular geneticist at Université René Descartes in Paris, France, announces its findings today on the Web site of the journal Nature.

Alternate method of inheritance may be down to contamination.

One of last year's most stunning biological discoveries is being called into question. Researchers say they are unable to repeat experiments that were thought to reveal a form of inheritance previously believed impossible.

In their 2005 Nature paper, Bob Pruitt and his colleagues at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, challenged the textbook rule stating that offspring receive a mix-and-match of their parents' genes. They suggested that some plants can instead convert their genetic sequences back into the code possessed by their grandparents or earlier generations — a discovery that sent ripples through the genetics community and beyond.

Now Steve Jacobsen of the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues say they cannot replicate Pruitt's work in their own experiments. In a short paper published online in Nature, they say stray pollen could account for Pruitt's results instead.

Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have given us one great reproductive insight: Incest is icky.

Inbreeding is the king of evolutionary no-no's. Related parents are more likely to have similar genetic mutations, so children of incest are at a high risk for birth defects and disease.

A natural aversion to incest is not the only mechanism that may have evolved to prevent inbreeding. A new paper published in the American Journal of Human Biology concludes that having a male in a household can affect the timing of menarche, when a young woman first gets her period.

The Pennsylvania State University team who performed the study attributes the effect to pheromones that evolved to thwart inbreeding. Yes: In a sense, the constant smell of dad is enough to stall puberty.

As global temperatures rise, male turtles may start to lose their cool.

Many reptiles, including most turtles, display temperature-dependent sex differentiation. In other words, the temperature that an egg incubates at determines the sex of hatchlings. In the case of turtles, warmer temperatures yield more female offspring, and cooler temperatures yield more males.

A new study by Stephanie Kamel and Nicholas Mrosovsky of the University of Toronto documents the peril of Caribbean hawksbill sea turtles as coastal forests disappear—and with them, cool, male-producing nesting sites.

Long-term sex-ratio bias is a real concern for sea turtles, Kamel said.

Worldwide, a population bias already exists against male sea turtles. Largely female sea turtle populations are common, whereas male-skewed populations are almost unknown.

Five years after the anthrax attacks that killed five people, the FBI is now convinced that the lethal powder sent to the Senate was far less sophisticated than originally believed, widening the pool of possible suspects in a frustratingly slow investigation.

The finding, which resulted from countless scientific tests at numerous laboratories, appears to undermine the widely held belief that the attack was carried out by a government scientist or someone with access to a U.S. biodefense lab.

What was initially described as a near-military-grade biological weapon was ultimately found to have had a more ordinary pedigree, containing no additives and no signs of special processing to make the anthrax bacteria more deadly, law enforcement officials confirmed. In addition, the strain of anthrax used in the attacks has turned out to be more common than was initially believed, the officials said.

In 1965 few people outside Silicon Valley had heard of Gordon Moore. For that matter, no one at all had heard of Silicon Valley. The name did not exist and the orchards of Santa Clara county still brought forth apples, not Macintoshes. But Mr Moore could already discern the outlines. For 1965 was the year when he published the paper that gave birth to his famous law that the power of computers, as measured by the number of transistors that could be fitted on a silicon chip, would double every 18 months or so.

Four decades later, equally few people have heard of Rob Carlson. Dr Carlson is a researcher at the University of Washington, and some graphs of the growing efficiency of DNA synthesis that he drew a few years ago look suspiciously like the biological equivalent of Moore's law. By the end of the decade their practical upshot will, if they continue to hold true, be the power to synthesise a string of DNA the size of a human genome in a day.

At the moment, what passes for genetic engineering is mere pottering. It means moving genes one at a time from species to species so that bacteria can produce human proteins that are useful as drugs, and crops can produce bacterial proteins that are useful as insecticides. True engineering would involve more radical redesigns. But the Carlson curve (Dr Carlson disavows the name, but that may not stop it from sticking) is making that possible.

In the search to determine what controls how genes are expressed, an increasing number of studies are pointing to the fine print.

A new study out of UCLA and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies adds to that fine print by providing a comprehensive map the entire genome of a common laboratory plant, highlighting areas where DNA methylation may have taken place.

DNA methylation is an "epigenetic process": it affects gene expression, but does not alter the sequence of bases that make up the genetic code. Methylation adds a methyl group to cytosine, one of the four DNA bases, and can silence genes by blocking their transcription into RNA. Because methylations can be inherited during DNA replication, in gene expression, they are just as important as any changes to the base sequence.

The new research on Arabidopsis thaliana a flowering plant of that is considered the mouse of laboratory research plantsoffers the first genome-wide analysis of methylation for any plant or animal.

The jumping of a gene from one chromosome to another can likely contribute to the birth of new species, a genetic analysis of flies reveals. The result validates an underappreciated mechanism of so-called reproductive isolation, a key component of speciation.

The formation of a species means that a group of organisms splits into two populations that cannot reproduce with one another. The reigning model of reproductive isolation holds that genetic differences accumulate between populations that render their hybrid offspring dead or sterile, like the mule, an infertile child of the donkey and horse. Many researchers have long assumed that this isolation must be the result of changes in gene sequence that introduce an incompatibility between groups, such as new sperm that do not recognize the old eggs. But examples of such speciation genes are very few.

Rearranged peptides may play big role in immunity.

Proteins seem to be more changeable than biologists once thought. Human cells can apparently shuffle the components of these molecules — dicing them up and reordering them to make new structures.

This ability might allow the body to boost our immune response against infected cells. And researchers are optimistic that it could enhance their understanding of how the immune system recognizes cells that need to be attacked.

Just because we've screwed up the climate doesn't mean we're to blame for everything.

This year may be remembered as the year the weight of climate change finally began to sink in. It only took climate scientists two decades of banging their heads against the wall to accomplish it.

While most observers call that cause for celebration, a few researchers are worried the climatologists have been too successful. They point to an increasing tendency to blame humans for ecological mysteries, a bias that's shaping funding priorities and hampering attempts to better understand natural history.

The earth is full of locales seemingly inhospitable to life. In areas like that deep beneath the ocean's mud floor, oxygen cannot penetrate. In such anoxic environments, the simple cellular precursors of all life--bacteria and archea--thrive, but the single-celled ancestors of more complex life-forms, known as eukaryotes, were thought to suffocate. Now new research has shown that at least one eukaryotic species--a shelled, amoebalike creature called a foraminifer--can prosper without oxygen by respiring nitrogen instead.

New cures, supercrops, and secrets of evolution may emerge from the fast-growing branches of the Tree of Life, scientists say.

The increasing availability of genetic information—and the computer technology to analyze it—is allowing researchers to begin drawing a detailed picture of how life on Earth originated, adapted, and diversified.

A huge amount of progress has been made over the last decade, said Michael Donoghue, a biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Donoghue attributes the progress to revolutions in molecular biology and computer technology that allow scientists to see at the genetic level how species are related to each other.

A small but passionate group of doctors say that electricity applied deep in the brain can jolt patients out of irreversible comas. That's when the real problems begin.

Cooper started testing this hypothesis in 1993. Candice Ivey was one of his first research subjects, and her recovery remains the most spectacular. But Cooper has gathered data on 37 other patients in two studies (at the University of Virginia and East Carolina University). The results indicate that people given electrical stimulation emerge from comas sooner and then regain function more quickly than if they are given only traditional treatment. They're more likely to leave the hospital under their own steam, with less-severe disabilities than would be predicted by the nature and extent of their injuries.

Venomous snakes send shivers down many people's spines, but venomous fish are far more common, scientists say.

According to a new evolutionary study, venomous species of fish outnumber not just such snakes, but all other venomous vertebrates combined.

In total, the world's oceans, lakes, and rivers harbor more than 1,200 species of venomous fish, write researchers from the American Museum of Natural History in a recent issue of the Journal of Heredity.

Previously, scientists had estimated that there were only 200 venomous fish. The new additions double the number of known venomous vertebrates to more than 2,000 species.

Populations of fruit flies on three separate continents have independently evolved identical gene changes within just two decades, apparently to cope with global warming.

What we're showing is that global warming is leaving its imprint on genes, says Raymond Huey at the University of Washington in Seattle, US, who made the discovery with colleagues. For this to happen in such a short time-frame in so many parts of the world is rather disturbing, he says.

The researchers analysed DNA from Drosophila subobscura, a species of fruit fly originating in Europe, but which spread to the west coasts of South and North America in the late 1970s. They took samples in 26 locations in Europe, South America and North America where the fly species had been analysed before for chromosomal changes.

Cancer results from cells gone wild. Proliferating out of control, the cells spawn malignant growths that can travel throughout the human body, spreading the disease. Some patients' immune systems are able to recognize such tumors and begin to attack them, and research has shown that boosting the patients' levels of such tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes can help defeat deadly cancer. Now scientists have transformed immune cells into cancer fighters outside the body--and prompted complete remission in two subjects when those cells were reintroduced.

Immune cells such as lymphocytes, also known as T cells and pictured in blue above, recognize health threats via special receptors on the cell surface. Steven Rosenberg of the National Cancer Institute and his colleagues first cloned the genes governing the cancer-recognizing receptor in immune cells from a patient who had successfully beaten back melanoma. The researchers introduced this genetic information into regular T cells from 17 melanoma patients via retrovirus.

Phytoplankton in the Pacific Ocean are starved for iron, and as a result these microscopic plants soak up less of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide than was previously thought, researchers have found. Although the difference in carbon uptake is not enough to perturb climate predictions significantly, the research should lead to an improved understanding of how climate changes will affect phytoplankton's ability to take up carbon.

The world's oceans tend to absorb carbon dioxide in the form of carbonate, but the Pacific Ocean actually emits CO2 in areas of cold, upwelling water that warms as it reaches the surface, releasing the gas. Phytoplankton thrive on this CO2, using it to drive their photosynthesis. But the plankton don't grow very fast given the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus at their disposal. To find out why, marine researchers took a zigzagging 12-year journey through the Pacific, collecting tens of thousands of plankton samples. Fluorescence imaging gave them a measure of the plankton's photosynthesis.

Ivan Pavlov has been away from the science desk here at Newsvine through the end of August, and he asked a couple of us other science news enthusiasts to put together some weekly summaries in his absence. I volunteered for the role, but as it turned out, this has been a fairly busy couple of weeks for me. Well, Ivan may never ask me for a favor again, but here is some of the highlights in the world of science for the past two weeks:

Space, Astronomy, & Cosmology

• Pluto hasn't changed at all, but we now no longer call it a planet. While early debate during the International Astronomical Union conference might result in the addition of two new planets, instead Pluto in the end got voted down to dwarf planet status.
• Scientists believe that they have finally observed dark matter. In the crash of a cluster of galaxies, a region presents the strongest evidence for matter which does not react to light.

Biology & Evolution

• A whale fossil discovered in Australia had some surprisingly fierce fangs, given the fact that it's descendants, the baleen whales, are all plankton eaters.
• The Flores "hobbits" may not have been a separate species after all, but rather a precursor to what are today known as pygmies.
• The Latin American ant has the world fastest bite. It's jaws snap so fast, it can send the small insect flying through the air to escape predators.

Math & Physics

• Last week the Field's medal recipients were announced, and the news focused all on Grigory Perelman who published a solution to the Poincare Conjecture (long considered to be one of math's most difficult problems). Perelman, unlike the three other announced recipients, turned down mathematicss' most prestigious award, citing the fact that he had moved on beyond the field of mathematics.

Climate & Geology

• The chemicals used in place of chlorofluorocarbons, which had been banned due to their harmful effects on the ozone layer, may be increasing global warming.

Biology & Medicine

• A synthetic molecule has been discovered that can cause cancer cells to self-destruct by signaling the protein procaspase-3 (which then turns into a cell destroying enzyme), thus causing cancer cells to die off like normal cells.
• A Massachusetts based biotech company announced that they have developed a method of creating embryonic stem cells which does not require the destruction of human embryos.

If there are any important science news items I've left out (my list is much shorter than Ivan's always are), if I've gotten any of the descriptions wrong, or if you've just got some comments to make on these few news items, leave a comment below.

Spiders are not famous for their caring, sharing nature. Unlike insects such as ants, it is virtually unheard of for arachnids to live in societies that employ tactics and team work.

So the discovery in Ecuador of spiders nesting in family-based communities and hunting in packs was a surprise find for Leticia Avilés, an arachnid expert at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

According to Avilés, there are over 39,000 identified spider species. While she has seen just over 20 species cooperate, she has never encountered any species quite like Theridion nigroannulatum.

The fastest evolving gene in the human genome is one linked to brain development, researchers say.

A study of differences between the human and chimp genomes has identified a gene associated with neural growth in the cerebral cortex – the part of the brain involved in processing thoughts and learning – as having undergone accelerated evolutionary change.

Katherine Pollard and colleagues at the University of California Santa Cruz, US, suggest that the fast-changing gene may help explain the dramatic expansion of this part of the brain during the evolution of humans.

The powerful adhesive responsible for the amazing sticking power of mussels has been revealed for the first time.

Researchers hope the discovery will lead to super-strength yet versatile medical glues, and suggest new ways of keeping the shellfish from wreaking havoc on marine infrastructures.

People in the United States are much less likely to accept Darwin's idea that humans evolved from apes than adults in other Western nations, a number of surveys show.

A new study of those surveys suggests that the main reason for this lies in a unique confluence of religion, politics, and the public understanding of biological science in the United States.

Researchers compared the results of past surveys of attitudes toward evolution taken in the U.S. since 1985 and similar surveys in Japan and 32 European countries.

Thanks to their domestication and favored pet status, dogs have enjoyed a genetic variability known to few other species.

A paper in the June 29th issue of Genome Research presents evidence suggesting that the domestication of dogs by humans has given rise to the immense diversity of the canine species by allowing otherwise harmful genetic mutations to survive.

Dogs that would have otherwise died in the wild would have survived because humans would have allowed them to, said Matt Webster, a geneticist at the University of Dublin and one of the study's authors.

One of the hottest debates among dinosaur experts is whether the ancient reptiles were warm-blooded or cold-blooded.

Now a new study has found that the answer may have varied with the size of the dinosaur.

What's more, the beasts' body temperatures may have changed by as much as 36°F (20°C) as they grew up.

Researchers find evidence that a variety of African electric fish are approaching speciation.

In what seems like a freshwater version of playing hard to get, a peculiar species of electric fish in Gabon's Ivindo River Basin may provide a rare snapshot of the evolutionary divergence of one species into two.

Researchers from Cornell University found that genetically identical fish are sending out two different electric signals, and certain male members of the species ignore some signals emitted by females, responding only to pulses similar to their own. The strict selectivity for specific signals observed in these electric fish may eventually result in different mating groups, leading researchers to surmise that the fish could be on the verge of speciation.

Evolution is a historical, inferential science—you can't really see it happening before your eyes, said Matt Arnegard, a neurobiology and behavior postdoc at Cornell and lead author of the study, which appears in the June issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology. We think maybe this is an example where we're really close to seeing it happen before our eyes.

The effeminate sheep & other problems with Darwinian sexual selection.

Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selection—she's no bible-toting creationist—but about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can't explain the homosexuality that's been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that same-sex sexuality—long disparaged as a quirk of human culture—is a normal, and probably necessary, fact of life. By neglecting all those gay animals, she says, Darwin misunderstood the basic nature of heterosexuality.

[H]aving homosexual sex is the biological equivalent of apple pie: Everybody likes it. At last count, over 450 different vertebrate species could be beheaded in Saudi Arabia. You name it, there's a vertebrate out there that does it. Nevertheless, most biologists continue to regard homosexuality as a sexual outlier. According to evolutionary theory, being gay is little more than a maladaptive behavior.

Joan Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford University, wants to change that perception. After cataloging the wealth of homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom two years ago in her controversial book Evolution's Rainbow—and weathering critiques that, she says, stemmed largely from her being transgendered—Roughgarden has set about replacing Darwinian sexual selection with a new explanation of sex. For too long, she says, biology has neglected evidence that mating isn't only about multiplying. Sometimes, as in the case of all those gay sheep, dolphins and primates, animals have sex just for fun or to cement their social bonds. Homosexuality, Roughgarden says, is an essential part of biology, and can no longer be dismissed. By using the queer to untangle the straight, Roughgarden's theories have the potential to usher in a scientific sexual revolution.

Darwin's theory of sex has been biological dogma ever since he postulated why peacocks flirt. His gendered view of life has become a centerpiece of evolution, one of his great scientific legacies. The culture wars over evolution and common descent notwithstanding, Darwin's theory of sexual selection has been thoroughly assimilated into mass culture. From sitcoms to beer ads, our coital "instincts" are constantly reaffirmed. Females are wary, and males are horny. Sex is this simple. Or is it?

From the pages of this month's Seed Magazine, Jonah Lehrer tells us how over 450 different animal species have been observed displaying homosexual behaviour. Read the whole article here.

From the Seed online article Time to Give It Up:

Lehigh biochemistry professor Michael Behe and his cronies in the intelligent design community have attempted to poke holes in evolutionary theory using an idea dubbed "irreducible complexity"—the notion that complex systems with interdependent parts could not have evolved through Darwinian trial and error and must be the work of a creator, since the absence of any single part makes the whole system void. However, a paper published in the April 7th issue of Science provides the first experimental proof that "irreducible complexity" is a misnomer, and that even the most complex systems come into being through Darwinian natural selection.

'We weren't motivated by irreducible complexity,' said Joe Thornton, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the paper. 'How complexity evolved is a longstanding issue in evolutionary biology per se, and it's once we saw our results that we realized the implications for the social debate.'

Thornton's team has been studying one example of a complex system in which each part defines the function of the other: the partnerships between hormones and the proteins on cell walls, or receptors, that bind them. The researchers looked specifically at the hormone aldosterone, which controls behavior and kidney function, and its receptor.

'Evolution assembles these complex systems by exploiting parts that are already present for other purposes, drawing them into new complexes and giving them new functions through very subtle changes in their sequences and in their structures,' Thornton said.

While the mutually dependent parts do not evolve to be perfectly complementary to one another, after molecular exploitation, they cleave together and create an illusion of irreducible complexity.

Darwin gets a boost by a new study citing evidence for the environmental basis of natural selection.

Amidst the hubbub of pundits and policy-makers bickering over evolution, intelligent design and creationism, a group of researchers working at Vanderbilt University have published the results of a wide-ranging study in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that provides evidence for an environmental basis for the origin of species, rather than a random series of genetic mutations, supporting the theory of natural selection.

"Since science never conclusively proves any theory, we cannot claim that our study does so," said Daniel Funk, assistant professor of biology at Vanderbilt and the main author of the study. "However, it is highly consistent with an integrated evolutionary perspective."

Several studies of individual species—such as cichlid fish in Lake Victoria—support Darwin's hypothesis of natural selection as a direct cause of speciation. Funk's study is the first to look for a general pattern across many species. The team found existing data on eight different animal and plant groups that tracked interbreeding capacity over time and compared it with data on environmental factors such as habitat and diet.