A marked T. angusticollis female on an Acacia trunk in Sydney. Evolutionary studies of aging typically utilize small, short-lived animals (insects, worms, mice) under benign conditions – constant temperature and humidity, no parasites, superabundant food – in the laboratory. Oddly enough, very little is known about aging in such animals in their harsh, stressful natural environments. Could it be that these laboratory "guinea pigs" actually age much more slowly in captive luxury than do their wild cousins?

Photos taken in Pakistan. Captive breeding colonies of a critically endangered vulture, whose numbers in the wild have dwindled from tens of millions to a few thousand, are too small to protect the species from extinction, a University of Michigan analysis shows.

Bumblebees learn to avoid camouflaged predators by sacrificing foraging speed for predator detection, according to scientists from Queen Mary, University of London.

The largest study ever conducted of DNA evidence extracted from long-dead woolly mammoths points to a rockier past for the iconic Ice Age giants than many had suspected.

The big-eared horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus macrotis. Echolocation may have evolved more than once in bats, according to new research from the University of Bristol published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Biocontrol agents, such as insects, are often released outside of their native ranges to control invasive plants. But scientists in Montana have found that through complex community interactions among deer mice, native plants and seeds, the presence of an introduced fly may exacerbate the effects of the invasive plant it was meant to control. The authors report their results in the September issue of the journal Ecological Applications.

A two-week-old black-footed ferret is pictured in its nesting box at the National Zoo's Conservation and Research Center in Front Royal, Va. on July 3, 2008. The kit was born on June 21 to a two-year-old mother and a father who had died in 2000. National Zoo reproductive scientists inseminated the female with frozen black-footed ferret semen stored in their genome resource bank -- a frozen repository of sperm and eggs of a variety of endangered species. Credit: Mehgan Murphy, Smithsonian’s National Zoo Two black-footed ferrets at the Smithsonian's National Zoo have each given birth to a kit that was sired by males who died in 1999 and 2000. These endangered ferrets—part of a multi-institutional breeding and reintroduction program—were artificially inseminated in May with frozen semen from the two deceased males, each giving birth to a kit on June 20 and 21 respectively. The sperm samples were collected and frozen in 1997 and 1998. Successful inseminations with frozen semen are extremely rare—until now only three black-footed ferret kits have been born from this method.

Although most people imagine wolves chasing deer and other hoofed animals, new research suggests that, when they can, wolves actually prefer fishing to hunting. The study, published today in the open access journal BMC Ecology, shows that when salmon is available, wolves will reduce deer hunting activity and instead focus on seafood.

The American Academy of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery Foundation (AAO-HNSF) will issue the first comprehensive clinical guidelines to help health care practitioners identify patients with cerumen (commonly referred to as earwax) impaction. The guidelines emphasize evidence-based management of cerumen impaction by clinicians, and inform patients of the purpose of ear wax in hearing health.

U. of I. entomology professor James Whitfield and doctoral student Josephine Rodriguez led the taxonomic part of a multi-disciplinary study of microgastrine wasps. A tiny wasp that lays its eggs under the skin of unwitting caterpillars belongs to one of the most diverse groups of insects on Earth. Now researchers report that its diversity is even higher than previously thought.

he eyes of some mammals have evolved to point in the same direction. While animals with forward facing eyes lose the ability to see what's behind them, they gain X-ray vision, which makes it possible for them to see through the clutter in the world. Credit: Rensselaer/Changizi The advantage of using two eyes to see the world around us has long been associated solely with our capacity to see in 3-D. Now, a new study from a scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has uncovered a truly eye-opening advantage to binocular vision: our ability to see through things.

Animals "personally" bring their gametes together – seeking out sexual partners, mating, fertilizing, and reproducing. Plants, however, are sessile organisms and require the help of a third party, the pollinator, which can be a bird, mouse or insect that transport pollen to receptive stigmas frequently over large distances. The colors and shapes of flowers as well as their volatile signals and nectar attract and reward the pollinators for their efforts. But not all flower visitors are pollinators, as many come only to steal nectar without transporting pollen or eat flower parts.

Researchers report the discovery of the first new living species of giant clam in two decades, according to a report to be published online on August 28th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. While fossil evidence reveals that the new species, called Tridacna costata, once accounted for more than 80 percent of giant clams in the Red Sea, it now represents less than one percent of giant clams living there.

A WCS report reveals surprisingly large populations of two globally threatened primates in a protected area in Cambodia.

It's no secret that humans are having a huge impact on the life cycles of plants and animals. UC Santa Barbara's Steven D. Gaines and fellow researcher Dov Sax decided to test that theory by studying the world's far-flung islands.

A new study could explain why "daddy" and "mommy" are often a baby's first words – the human brain may be hard-wired to recognize certain repetition patterns.

Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have shown capuchin monkeys, just like humans, find giving to be a satisfying experience. This finding comes on the coattails of a recent imaging study in humans that documented activity in reward centers of the brain after humans gave to charity. Empathy in seeing the pleasure of another's fortune is thought to be the impetus for sharing, a trait this study shows transcends primate species.

Researchers at the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences have developed a unique test for perfect pitch, and have found surprising results.

The ostentatious, sometimes bizarre qualities that improve a creature's chances of finding a mate may also drive the reproductive separation of populations and the evolution of new species, say two Indiana University Bloomington biologists.

A group of Yale undergraduates have discovered dozens of potentially beneficial bioactive microorganisms within plants they collected in the Amazon rain forest, including several so genetically distinct that they may be the first members of new taxonomical genera.

Throughout history, elephants have been thought of as 'different'. Shakespeare, and even Aristotle, described them as walking on inflexible column-like legs. And this myth persists even today. Which made John Hutchinson from The Royal Veterinary College, London, want to find out more about elephants and the way they move. Are they really that different from other, more fleet-footed species? Are their legs as rigid and 'columnar' as people had thought? Traveling to Thailand and several UK zoos, Hutchinson and his team investigated how Asian Elephants move their legs as they walk and run and publishes his results in The Journal of Experimental Biology on August 22 2008 at http://jeb.biologists.org

Healthy red algae (Devaleraea ramentacea). It is red, it burns and itches: a sunburn on our skin. However, too much sun is not only bad for humans. Many plants react sensitively to an increased dose of ultraviolet radiation, too. Yet they are dependent on sunlight. With the help of pigments absorbing solar energy and light, plants produce their vitally important building blocks by means of photosynthesis. However, this has its limits: too much sun means an over-abundance of energy and thus the destruction of the sensitive pigments. The result are black spots, pale leaves and rotten parts.

Like most things that exist underground, plant roots are out-of-sight and easily forgotten, but while flowers, leaves, and other aboveground plant parts are more familiar, plant roots are equally deserving of our appreciation. Beneath every towering tree, tasty crop, and dazzling ornamental lies a root system that makes it all possible. Roots provide anchor and support for plants, extract water and nutrients from soil, and reduce soil erosion. Roots also play an important role in soil carbon cycling and the global carbon balance.

A male specimen of the newly-discovered olive-backed forest robin is carefully examined in the hand of Brian Schmidt, the Smithsonian ornithologist who discovered the species. Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution have discovered a new species of bird in Gabon, Africa, that was, until now, unknown to the scientific community. Their findings were published in the international science journal Zootaxa today, Aug. 15.

Parrots have a big brain and are also one of the most evolutionarily diversified bird clades. Ever since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have wondered why some lineages have diversified more than others. A classical explanation is that a higher rate of diversification reflects increased ecological opportunities that led to a rapid adaptive radiation of a clade. A textbook example is Darwin finches from Galapagos, whose ancestor colonized a competitors-free archipelago and rapidly radiated in 13 species, each one adapted to use the food resources in a different way. This and other examples have led some to think that the progenitors of the major evolutionary radiations are those that happened to be in the right place and at the right time to take advantage of ecological opportunities. However, is it possible that biological diversification not only depends on the properties of the environment an ancestral species finds itself in, but also on the features of the species itself? Now a study supports this possibility, suggesting that possessing a large brain might have facilitated the evolutionary diversification of some avian lineages.

As poets, songwriters and authors have described, our memories range from misty water-colored recollections to vividly detailed images of the times of our lives.

Protemnodon skull from cave at Mt. Cripps, northwest Tasmania. Research led by UK and Australian scientists sheds new light on the role that our ancestors played in the extinction of Australia's prehistoric animals. The study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, provides the first evidence that Tasmania's giant kangaroos and marsupial 'rhinos' and 'leopards' were still roaming the island when humans first arrived. The findings suggest that the mass extinction of Tasmania's large prehistoric animals was the result of human hunting, and not climate change as previously believed.

In a recent paper in The Royal Society's Biology Letters, conservationists with the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Zoological of London found that the oldest matriarch elephants may retain valuable memories of permanent sources of food and water and their that become crucial in times of drought. Credit: (c) Charles Foley A recent study by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) suggests that old female elephants—and perhaps their memories of distant, life-sustaining sources of food and water—may be the key to survival during the worst of times.

The traditional view of individual brain areas involved in perception of different sensory stimuli—i.e., one brain region involved in hearing and another involved in seeing—has been thrown into doubt in recent years. A new study published in the online open access journal BMC Neuroscience, shows that, in monkeys, the region involved in hearing can directly improve perception in the visual region, without the involvement of other structures to integrate the senses.

The Douglas-fir, state tree of Oregon, towering king of old-growth forests and one of the tallest tree species on Earth, finally stops growing taller because it just can't pull water any higher, a new study concludes.