Human pollutants can cause drastic decreases in microbial diversity, but the bacteria that survive the contamination may yield clues for how to remove such toxins from the environment, according to a study published in The International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal. This study suggests "that bacteria can survive in highly toxic environments," said linkurl:Mihai Pop,;http://www.cbcb.umd.edu/~mpop/ a bioinformaticist at University of Maryland, who was not involved in the research.Aircraf

Material from crushed up crab and shrimp shells can restore electrical function to damaged guinea pig spinal cords, suggesting it may one day serve as a treatment for spinal cord injuries, according to a study published April 16th in the Journal of Experimental Biology. This paper is an "intriguing first step," said linkurl:Scott Whittemore,;http://louisville.edu/kscirc/bios/dr-scott-r-whittemore.html professor of neurological surgery at the University of Louisville, who was not involved in th

Alaskan wildlife biologists are questioning the new head of the linkurl:Alaska Division of Wildlife Conservation at the Department of Fish and Game;http://www.wildlife.alaska.gov/ (ADFG) -- both his qualifications (or lack thereof) and his pro-hunter management strategies. A group of nearly 40 retired state biologists wrote a linkurl:letter;http://media.newsminer.com/docs/2010/rossiletter.pdf last month to linkurl:Denby Lloyd,;http://www.adfg.state.ak.us/commissioner/commissioner.php commission

Most people who go to natural history museums come by way of a yellow school bus. linkurl:The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia;http://www.ansp.org/ is trying to broaden their audience and bring more adults into the museum. "For some reason natural history museums are thought of as a place for kids and they are," said Barbara Ciega, vice president of public operations for the Academy. She continued, "You can enjoy natural history as much as an adult as you could when you were a child.

Most university professors have ideas for how to get their students excited about the science they're studying -- rarely do those plans involve claymation. Unless, of course, you happen to be Brown University evolutionary biologist linkurl:Casey Dunn's;http://www.brown.edu/Faculty/Dunn_Lab/ student. "Nature documentaries like 'Blue Planet' and 'Planet Earth' were a big part of what got me interested in science, and it was fun to kind of ape the best parts of existing nature documentaries while

Drugs being investigated for Alzheimer's disease may be causing further neural degeneration and cell death, calling for a change in the way Alzheimer's medications are developed, according to results published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. β-amyloidImage: Wikimedia commons, Boku wa Kage This finding "would result in a paradigm shift" in the understanding of the molecular mechanism underlying Alzheimer's disease, said linkurl:Brigita Urbanc,;http://www.phys

What do a yam, a wasp, and a wallaby all have in common? Well, not much, actually, but they're all being touted as the next big experimental model, according to a new laboratory manual due out in April. The second volume of Emerging Model Organisms, from the linkurl:Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press,;http://www.cshlpress.com/ examines a range of organisms -- some familiar, some not -- that could soon be coming to a lab near you. Image:Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press linkurl:Richard Behrin

Walter Plowright, a pioneer in the field of veterinary medicine who helped to eradicate so-called "cattle plague," rinderpest, died last month at the age of 86. Rinderpest has been considered one of the world's greatest natural disasters. In the late 1800s, rinderpest spread to Africa through India, killing an estimated 90 percent of domesticated cattle. As a result, one third of the population of Ethiopia, and two thirds of the Maasai, died due to starvation. Outbreaks in Africa continued thr

New findings are challenging the current understanding of how non-neural brain cells contribute to brain signaling, by showing that calcium levels in these cells do not affect synaptic activity. An astrocyteImage: Wikimedia commons, DantecatThe results appear in this week's Science. In the past couple of years, the idea that these non-neural brain cells, known as glial cells, participate in neurotransmission "had been widely accepted," linkurl:Frank Kirchhoff,;http://kirchhoff-lab.de/index.ht