"The lesions we were seeing were strikingly similar to those that we often see on the skulls of modern mammals that ram heads,
Badger battle erupts in Englandengland s West country is a bucolic landscape of winding country lanes and gently rolling pastures.
At issue is the badger (Meles meles), one of the largest predators left in The british Isles after millennia of human occupation.
As early as this week, government-sanctioned hunters will begin a pilot effort to cull the badgers.
In the United states, environmentalists and ranchers spar over wolves, which have been reintroduced to many states. In Western australia
But the badger question stands out in one distinctive way: it has been studied systematically for more than a decade by scientists at some of England s top universities.
Badgers do carry TB and can infect cows through direct and indirect contact, and years of research and tens of millions of pounds have gone into studying
collecting road kill and performing autopsies on more than a thousand badgers to check for TB. The results are discussed at length in a 287-page UK government study and in numerous scientific papers
The schism reveals an uneasy truth about the badger issue: science doesn t give a clear answer about what to do.
And, uncomfortable as it is for animal-lovers, killing large numbers of badgers does help to reduce levels of bovine TB.
DEFRATHE trial backed by Krebs (officially known as the Randomised Badger Culling Trial, or RBCT) showed a 23%reduction in bovine TB in the area of the cull,
although the areas immediately outside the trial area saw an increase of roughly 25%a consequence of badgers extending their normal range.
scientists decided in 2011 that culling about 70%of the badgers in larger areas would lead to an overall reduction in bovine TB of up to 16%.
me, says Jack Reedy, spokesman for the Badger Trust, a nonprofit organization based in East Grinstead, UK,
that opposes the killing of badgers. He adds that controlling cattle movements and increasing TB screening on farms would have a greater impact.
as well as what the government described as a"science-led policy of killing badgers in areas of high bovine TB.
to prevent infected badgers from roaming in or out of the cull zone. For many scientists,
as it is virtually impossible to determine badger populations in advance of actually killing them. On 14 october 31 academics warned in a letter to The Observer newspaper that
because infected badgers will begin to roam more widely.""They say that their policy will be based science
and the easiest something to do is to shoot badgers. Other parts of The british Isles have taken already action.
The irish have used targeted snare-trapping to all but eliminate badgers from selected areas. That system would be more affordable
In Wales, officials have begun an expensive campaign to immunize badgers against TB. Both techniques depend on the peculiarities of local geography and badger populations,
but they reflect the range of approaches that can be supported by the scientific evidence. Policy-makers
and conservationists concede that badgers are a major reservoir for the disease.""They may not be singing from the same hymn sheet,
5 11 october 2012photas/TASS/PAMAMMOTH unearthed from Siberian mud A remarkably well-preserved 30,000-year-old mammoth was revealed on 4 october,
) GM study slammed A study claiming that rats fed Monsanto's genetically modified NK603 maize (corn) or its companion glyphosate-based herbicide,
In mice, they discovered a short chunk of RNA, called a microrna, that targeted beta-lactoglobulin MESSENGER RNA directly to prevent its translation.
and cows can now be thought of as big mice, but we are moving in that direction,
In rats, they found that upping the levels of that sugar could reduce the severity of NEC on its own3.
Mexico s primary research funding agency, the National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT), stands to get the lion s share of new science funds,
Pigs are more expensive to keep than rodents, and they reproduce more slowly. But the similarities between pig and human anatomy and physiology can trump the drawbacks.
unlike mouse models, developed symptoms resembling those in humans. Geneticist and veterinarian Eckhard Wolf at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, has exploited the similarity between the human
and pig gastrointestinal system and metabolism like us, pigs will eat almost anything and then suffer for it to develop models of diabetes.
Mice with the transgene developed unexpectedly severe diabetes, but the pigs have a more subtle pre-diabetic condition that better models the human disease."
says Wolf. Pig models are now being developed for other common conditions, including Alzheimer s disease, cancer and muscular dystrophy.
This atrophy is prompted by metabolites that purge the muscle cells of mitochondria and sarcoplasmic reticulum (which provide energy and signals), according to the BMC Ecology research.
Research published in Biology Letters in 2010 describes a 48-million-year-old fossilized leaf from Germany that bears the distinctive scars of a bite from an ant's mandible on its main vein.
Maurice Leponce, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciencesthe male elephant scarab beetle, Megasoma elephas fights for females and food with a formidable horn.
Massive Malaysian ivory cache seizedit has been reported widely this week that Malaysian authorities have confiscated 24 tonnes of elephant ivory.
Data from ETIS, compiled by TRAFFIC on behalf of Parties to CITESTHE Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) has banned trading in elephant ivory since 1989, apart from in specific circumstances,
According to data from the CITES Elephant Trade Information system the year 2011 broke all previous records, with 39 tonnes intercepted (see graph.
an elephant specialist at the environmental group WWF, seems to be a growing demand for ivory in Asia.
because that country is believed to have a very small population of remaining elephants. To trace tusks back to their origin,
director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle, has built a map of elephant DNA obtained from faeces samples from across Africa.
Most biologists consider African elephants to include at least two species the savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) and the forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis.
The red list of threatened species, drawn up by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, lists African elephants as vulnerable."
That means there are a lot of elephants disappearing
Art of cheese-making is 7, 500 years oldtraces of dairy fat in ancient ceramic fragments suggest that people have been making cheese in Europe for up to 7, 500 years.
has rejected the findings of a controversial paper published in September (see go. nature. com/3slkys) claiming that rats fed genetically modified maize (corn) showed adverse health effects,
Kevin Wolf/APENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCYDEPARTING: Lisa Jackson On entering office in 2009, Jackson (pictured) laid the groundwork for climate regulations by formally declaring carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant.
Face-to-face with the earliest ancestor of all placental mammalsafter an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs save for those that evolved into today's birds a small,
A team of scientists in the United states and Canada has reconstructed now the appearance and anatomy of this creature the forebear of all'placental'mammals,
confirms that the placentals diversified a few hundred thousand years after the (non-avian) dinosaurs went extinct,
so groups such as rodents and primates never shared the planet with the prehistoric reptiles. This conclusion is backed up by the fact that no one has ever found fossils of placental mammals from before the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago
but it contradicts genetic studies that put the group s origin at around 100 million years ago.
These included traits from 86 living and extinct mammals.""The data matrix that they've assembled is jaw-dropping,
"It undoubtedly provides one of the best estimates of evolutionary relationships within placental mammals to date. The team took two years just to identify the characteristics that they wanted to analyse,
and someone working on whales might call it something else. The researchers bolstered their anatomical results with DNA,
The resulting tree for placental mammals could help to resolve some longstanding debates. For example, it suggests that the treeshrews
and flying lemurs are equally closely related to primates, which include humans. Genetic studies had suggested that flying lemurs were related most closely.
The placental tree also shows that the Afrotheria, the group of African mammals that includes elephants
and aardvarks, evolved from ancestors in North and South america that are now extinct. This creature must have been around after the supercontinent of Gondwana split into today s southern land masses,
so its descendants must have swum or otherwise travelled over long distances to explain the wide distribution of placentals today."
"What fascinates me most is the tremendous incongruence between the morphological and molecular data, says Mark Springer, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside.
For example, grouping animals according to their anatomy alone puts physically similar species such as pangolins, anteaters and aardvarks in the same tight group,
Bininda-Emonds adds that the team estimated the timing of the placental evolutionary explosion using just fossil information
A lighthouse keeper's cat Tibbles aided by a few feral cats perhaps caught and killed nearly every single Stephens Island wren
Hungry sailors ate the Steller's sea cow to death within a century of its discovery. The Xerces Blue butterfly disappeared with the sand dunes from San francisco in the 1940s as that city swelled.
A similar bid by scientists in South korea to revive the woolly mammoth an even more scientifically challenging feat
or even sabre-tooth cats although species that have been extinct for more than a few thousand years are unlikely to be found preserved with enough DNA intact to permit their restoration.
or egg cells that bear the DNA of endangered or extinct species and can provide the genetic code to restore
and finally grows into a mammoth, however, is a process still beyond even the most advanced genetic science.
There is also the mammoth challenge of restoring the world or at least the ecosystems that the elephant relatives inhabited, among other hurdles.
And given the perilous plight of still extant elephant species, humanity has yet to show that it can manage the survival, let alone the revival, of a pachyderm.
Still, there are lessons to be learned from the mammoth, not least the importance of cold. The Arctic is the best place for the long-term preservation of DNA,
Shapiro said. It's cold and it's been cold for at least the last million years.
This ark maintained at a steady-197 degrees Celsius, holds the cells of 503 mammals, 170 birds, 70 reptiles and 12 amphibians and fish out of an estimated 10 million animal
At this moment, brave conservationists are risking their lives to protect forest elephants from armed poachers, noted biologist David Ehrenfeld of Rutgers University at TEDX.
And we're talking in this safe auditorium about bringing back the woolly mammoth
Wildlife trade meeting endorses DNA testing of seized ivoryif you go into a bar in Bangkok tonight,
and plants has bolstered protection for a number of species. Besides agreeing to clamp down more strongly on the trade in ivory and rhino horn,
researchers across the world had warned of the dire state of African elephant populations, which are currently being decimated by rampant poaching.
UK and has been involved heavily in the debates about elephant poaching, said,"I think this is one of the best COPS
says Samuel Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the driving forces behind the push for forensic examinations of elephant ivory.
UK and the founder of the charity Save the Elephants, based in Nairobi.""For the first time in 22 years there was no proposal to sell ivory.
Enforcement of rhino protection is also to be strengthened, with Mozambique and Vietnam now required to toughen up their controls on trade in horns.
Humans are not the only copycatsa team led by Erica van de Waal, a primate psychologist at the University of St andrews,
UK, created two distinct cultures'blue'and'pink'among groups of wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus aethiops) in South Africa1.
The researchers trained two sets of monkeys to eat maize (corn) dyed one of those two colours
Baby monkeys ate the same colour maize as their mothers. Seven of the ten males that migrated from one colour culture to another adopted the local colour preference the first time that they ate any maize.
The only immigrant to buck this trend was a monkey who assumed the top rank in his new group as soon as he got there
says Frans de Waal, director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research center at Emory University in Atlanta,
In the second study, a team led by St andrews marine mammal science student Jenny Allen examined 27 years of whale-watching data from the Gulf of Maine, off the eastern coast of the United states,
to determine whether social cues helped an innovative feeding method to proliferate among humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) 2. Humpbacks everywhere feed by blowing bubbles under schools of fish,
When the whales lunge upward, they can gulp down a super-sized serving of fish.
a humpback slapping the surface of the water with its tail fluke before proceeding with a standard bubble feed.
but by 2007,37%of the humpbacks in the Gulf of Maine were observed using the technique,
Allen and her colleagues applied a method called network-based diffusion analysis to observations of humpback behaviour collected by the Whale Center of New england in Gloucester, Massachusetts, between 1980 and 2007.
Allen's analysis found that up to 87%of whales that adopted the lobtail-feeding technique learned it from other humpbacks."
"We know that humpback songs are transmitted also culturally, says Luke Rendell, a biologist at St andrews and co-author of the whale study,
"so here we have a population with two independently evolving cultural traditions a culture. David Wiley, research coordinator at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration's Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary in Scituate,
"It adds to a growing body of information demonstrating the complexity of humpback-whale behaviour and its apparent roots in social learning,
Proximity between bird and mammal populations could also give the virus opportunities for further adaptation to mammals,
Primate carriers Vietnam Airlines said on 19 april that it will no longer transport primates used in research experiments, effective from 1 may.
It was one of the last major carriers to transport primates for research: only Air france and Philippine Airlines say that they still do so.
They demanded that all its 800 animals (mostly genetically modified mice) be transferred into their care.
a phenomenon that has been seen various rodents and people3-5. Inflammation brought on by abrupt weaning may also have a role,
including mammals, the pattern of many human cases over a wide area in a short time could be explained by live markets alone,
) A key component the haemagglutinin (H) protein on the surface of the virus already contains mutations known to shift its binding preference from bird cells to those of mammals.
two that encode the haemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N) proteins that stud the surface of the virus,
The virus also contains several other genetic variations that are known from past studies in mice and other animals to cause severe disease.
But given that H7n9 has mutations that enable it to infect mammals, pigs might be another source,
or door number two, where there are our beloved guinea pigs, says Vosshall. The mutant mosquitoes that did pick the scent of the human arm,
Seafood diet killing Arctic foxes on Russian islandan isolated population of Arctic foxes that dines only on marine animals seems to be slowly succumbing to mercury poisoning.
The foxes on Mednyi Island one of Russia s Commander Islands in the Bering sea are a subspecies of Arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) that may have remained isolated for thousands of years.
the fox population began to crash, falling from more than 1, 000 animals to fewer than 100 individuals today.
and their dogs so they teamed up with Alex Greenwood, head of the wildlife diseases department at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin,
They screened for four common canine pathogens in foxes captured on Mednyi Island and in the pelts of museum specimens of Commander Island foxes.
So the researchers looked at the foxes diet. Mednyi Island foxes subsist by hunting sea birds and scavenging seal carcasses.
Because pollutants such as mercury are known to accumulate in marine animals particularly in the Arctic, they tested the foxes for the heavy metal
and found high levels of it. The foxes'hair had 10 milligrams of mercury per kilogram on average, with peaks of 30 mg kg-1. By comparison,
inland foxes in Iceland had lower levels, of about 3. 5 mg kg-1. Greenwood s team also compared mercury levels in the Mednyi foxes to those in the population on the neighbouring Bering Island,
and in coastal fox populations in Iceland. Levels of mercury were high there, too. But the Bering Island population
and the coastal Icelandic foxes had experienced not the same population crash as their relatives on Mednyi.
The results were published on 7 may in the journal PLOS ONE1. The difference, the researchers think,
is that the Mednyi foxes have no other options for food. Bering Island is bigger than Mednyi, with small mammals such lemmings and voles,
as well as a human population that creates rubbish that the foxes can eat. The Icelandic coastal foxes, likewise, have the option of moving inland to vary their diet."
"It s not so much what they are eating, as where they are eating, says Greenwood."
"The Mednyi foxes may be more susceptible to increasing global mercury levels. But Dominique Berteaux, an Arctic ecologist at the University of Quebec in Rimouski, Canada, cautions that the team has not definitively proved a link between mercury contamination
and the population decline in this study.""It s always been a hypothesis, but it s very difficult to prove,
who is director of the Arctic fox Center in S Â Ë av  k, Iceland,
Primate pull out Harvard Medical school announced on 23 Â April that it will close its 47-year-old New england Primate Research center in Southborough, Massachusetts.
860 nonhuman primates   mostly macaques   will close by 2015 owing to a cash shortage.
The animals will be transferred to other primate research centres or be maintained on site, say medical-school officials.
with four primate deaths occurring between June 2010 and February 2012. See go. nature. com/zsavjr for more.
barbed wire and guard dogs, swim the world s most expensive and scrutinized fish. These swift-growing salmon have been at the centre of a 18-year,
UK official defends badger cullengland s badgers are once again in the firing line, as pilot culls to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis begin.
And in our case the wildlife reservoir is badgers. Defraian Boydthe problem is tuberculosis not badgers.
Badgers happen to be in the middle of this, and unfortunately the methods for dealing with that problem mean we need to reduce the densities of badgers.
We don t have an alternative to that at the moment. I would say, and I have said to them,
that it is based evidence policy. The first line of evidence is the RBCT the large-scale Randomised Badger Culling Trials run in the 1990s
and 2000s that we carried out, which were very extensive and showed the effect that sustained removal of badgers can have on reducing bovine tuberculosis in cattle.
The second main line of evidence is the comparison with other countries that have had similar problems.
And the only difference between Ireland and ourselves is that Ireland is reducing its badger densities.
Some of the people who have been opposed publicly to badger culling were at the meeting. A significant part of that meeting was supportive of the approach that is being taken.
or badgers and the susceptibles are cattle or badgers doesn t matter. It s the badger-cattle interface we need to understand.
And if we understand that well, then we can start to manage it. I would also point to vaccines as well.
Vaccines, at the end of the day, are going to be what allows us to actually eradicate TB. Clearly reducing wildlife populations and killing cattle is not going to actually produce the elimination that we re really striving for.
We probably have to also move to vaccination of badgers. There s an injectable vaccine available at the moment,
. So we need to get an oral vaccine for badgers, and we re still some way from doing that.
This isn t just about badgers and cattle. It s about badgers cattle and farmers. And other members of the public as well they have choices to make.
We have to understand those social dynamics as much as we have to understand the epidemiological dynamics of the disease.
Mice accounted for 76%of the 4. 03 Â million animals that were used for the first time last year in procedures including breeding and experiments.
or transplants of living cells from other species. It would also stop the breeding of dogs, cats and primates in Italy for research,
or Fox, constellation. At Hubble s optical resolution, light from the planet and its star typically blend together.
whether vaccines developed against a closely related virus peste des petits ruminants (PPR), which causes disease in sheep
But Guan and his team found that ferrets could become infected with the virus suggesting that a spread to humans is possible.
in humans and mice, it is involved in sexual development and bone density. She adds that heterozygotes such as Alpha Red 78 end up with more offspring largely
Researchers reported on 9  August that of 50  Omani camels sampled, all showed evidence of previous infection with MERS-Cov or a closely related virus (C.  B.  E.  M.  Reusken et  al.
whether camels could be a source of human infections. Stormy Atlantic The current Atlantic hurricane season,
by adding an antibody to fight rotavirus originally found in llamas in the rice genome.
The team fed Mucorice-ARP1 to mice they subsequently infected with rotavirus, and found these mice had significantly less virus than mice fed normal rice.
The rice could be used to complement vaccinations to protect children when they are at their most vulnerable to rotavirus,
Originally found in llamas, arp1 is ideal for oral immunotherapy as it is not readily digested by the acids in the human stomach, according to Iturriza-Gomara.
Llamas produce single-chain antibodies which have two important properties: one, they are very small
Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2013essence of elephants'by Greg du Toit depicts the animals at night.
one rather disgusting skin disease that his doctors linked to baboon faecal matter, and a fresh perspective on Africa's wild animals.
This photo, entitled'Essence of Elephants',was the winner of the exhibition's Animal Portraits award.
His shots of polar bears (Ursus maritimus and other animals on Russia's Wrangel Island wowed the crowd at Wildphotos.
Toshiji Fukuda/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2013'Tiger untrapped'by Toshiji Fukuda shows an endangered Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica.
but also for his dedication to photographing the Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) in the wild. Fukuda spent 74 days in a small, specially constructed hut in the Far Eastern Federal district, Russia, waiting for this animal one of only around 300 Amur,
or Siberian, tigers left in the wild. Luis Javier Sandoval/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2013'Dive buddy'by Luis Javier Sandoval depicts an endangered green turtle (Chelonia mydas.
Brent Stirton/Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2013in'Ivory trash'by Brent Stirton, a Kenyan ranger inspects elephants killed by poachers.
Early dinosaurs such as the dog-sized Coelophysis also roamed there, and radiometric dating has shown how these dinosaurs were related to those in other parts of the Americas3.
The team already has its eye on other cores that it could drill
Study linking GM maize to rat tumours is retractedbowing to scientists'near-universal scorn, the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology today fulfilled its threat to retract a controversial paper claiming that a genetically modified (GM) maize causes serious disease in rats,
after the authors refused to withdraw it. The paper, from a research group led by Gilles-Eric SÃ ralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen, France,
The known high incidence of tumours in the Sprague-Dawley strain of rat cannot be excluded as the cause of the higher mortality
The study found that rats fed for two years with Monsanto s glyphosate-resistant NK603 maize (corn) developed many more tumours
It also found that the rats developed tumours when glyphosate (Roundup), the herbicide used with GM maize,
See'Rat study sparks GM furore'.'At the 28 november press conference, Corinne Lepage, a Member of the European parliament and former French environment minister, said that SÃ ralini s paper asked"good questions about the long-term toxicity of GMOS GM
from viruses to fish and mammals, have become invasive in the country (see Space invaders).
Listening to Africa s elephantslast week, audio from the Elephant Listening Project was released, featuring the actual moment an elephant was killed by poachers (see video).
The low-frequency recording, which sounds almost abstract, was captured by some of the special microphones set up by the project in the forests of Gabon and the Republic of congo.
The aim is to monitor the sounds that forest elephants use to communicate, which humans can sometimes feel
Behavioural ecologist Peter Wrege directs the Elephant Listening Project. Nature interviewed behavioural ecologist Peter Wrege of the The Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New york,
For example, other than counting dung piles along a transect to try to estimate population density, the only typical method of collecting data on forest elephants is by direct observation at clearings in the forest, measuring
Although some of these measurements can't be made just from acoustic records at least not yet relative numbers of elephants
Nations fight back on ivorymy impression is that the situation is very bad for forest elephants.
we think that forest elephants are taking the brunt of ivory poaching more and more. Rainforests are difficult places to patrol
I would say that all populations of forest elephants are in deep trouble, and the ones most at risk are those at the edges of their current range in Cameroon and the Central african republic.
where once more than 60%of all forest elephants lived. I believe there are some fronts where science can be a big help.
As populations of elephants decline, we need to be able to predict where they are going to be
whether they are aware that more money has been flowing in to protect elephants. They will look at you like you are crazy.
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