The most extensive DNA study to-date of Africa`s rarest monkey reveals that the species had an intriguing sexual past. Of the last two remaining populations of the recently discovered kipunji, one population shows evidence of past mating with baboons while the other does not, says a new study in Biology Letters. The results may help to set conservation priorities for this critically endangered spe...

Thirty million years ago, before Ethiopia`s mountainous highlands split and the Great Rift Valley formed, the tropical zone had warmer soil temperatures, higher rainfall and different atmospheric circulation patterns than it does today, according to new research of fossil soils found in the central African nation. Neil J. Tabor, associate professor of Earth Sciences at SMU and an expert in sedimen...

What`s so great about sex? From an evolutionary perspective, the answer is not as obvious as one might think. An article published in the July issue of the American Naturalist suggests that sex may have evolved in part as a defense against parasites. Despite its central role in biology, sex is a bit of an evolutionary mystery. Reproducing without sex—like microbes, some plants and even a few...

The study was initiated in 1985. A total of 51 teenagers with anorexia nervosa were studied, together with an equally large control group of healthy persons. The groups have been investigated and compared several times as the years have passed. "This study is unique in an international perspective. It is the only study in the world that reflects the natural course of anorexia nervosa in the p...

More than a third of patients who took part in an eight-week smoking cessation programme before and after planned surgery were able to give up and most of them were still smoke free after a year, according to new research. They also experienced half as many complications after surgery as the patients who did not receive help to give up smoking, with 21 per cent experiencing problems as opposed to ...

Your mother always told you not to use your teeth as tools to open something hard, and she was right. Human skulls have small faces and teeth and are not well-equipped to bite down forcefully on hard objects. Not so of our earliest ancestors, say scientists. New research published in the February 2009 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals nut-cracking abilities in our 2....

A researcher from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) has determined that a 9-month old infant who was admitted to a local Boston hospital with seizures and a bulging soft spot was actually suffering from rickets caused by vitamin D deficiency. This case study describing the findings appear in the January 22nd issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. A 9-month-old breast-fed male inf...

Chinese government regulators had clearer skies and easier breathing in mind in the summer of 2008 when they temporarily shuttered some factories and banished many cars in a pre-Olympic sprint to clean up Beijing’s air. And that`s what they got. They were not necessarily planning for something else: an unprecedented experiment using satellites to measure the impact of air pollution controls....

An international team of scientists who analyzed data from the Gamma Ray Spectrometer onboard NASA`s Mars Odyssey reports new evidence for the controversial idea that oceans once covered about a third of ancient Mars. "We compared Gamma Ray Spectrometer data on potassium, thorium and iron above and below a shoreline believed to mark an ancient ocean that covered a third of Mars` surface, and ...