My Picks From ScienceDaily

NASA Engineer Helps Train Puppy For Future Leadership Role:

One of NASA's newest workers is a top dog ... literally. A golden retriever puppy named Aries goes to work every day at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. as part of the "Leader Dogs for the Blind" program. Her mentor is structural engineer Evan J. Horowitz.

Snake Venom As Therapeutic Treatment Of Cancer?:

This certainly sounds unusual, but Dr. Son and colleagues report on the effectiveness of the snake venom toxin (SVT) Vipera lebetina turanica in the inhibition of androgen-independent prostate cancer (AICAP) in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics.

Disputing Coevolution In Herbivorous Insects: Do We Need A Paradigm Change?:

Coleoptera (beetles) are one of the most successful groups of organisms on Earth. Their success in evolutionary terms is recognised by their extreme adaptive diversity (occupying almost every possible ecological niche) and their longevity (fossils from the Palaeozoic, 280 million years ago). But most of all, their success is indisputable in their sheer species numbers: with over 350,000 named species and many more to be described, they constitute about one fourth of all species on the Planet! It is commonly accepted that phytophagous beetles and their host plants (mainly the likewise speciose angiosperms or flowering plants) have radiated in concert since the origin of both groups in the early Cretaceous. Indeed, this is a text-book example of coevolution and a straightforward interpretation of the forces driving evolution and the rise of new species.

Over Half The World's Magnolia Species Face Extinction In Their Native Forests:

A mapping exercise by experts from Bournemouth University's School of Conservation Sciences has revealed that over half of the world's magnolia species face extinction in their native forest habitats.

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In honor of the local paper's attempt to get an in-depth look at events around Lawrence for 24 hours, I spent a little time outside city limits with a bug net and a camera. While a bug-on-the-street interview is less traditional than other coverage the day generated, I think that a look at the…
There are 34 articles published in PLoS ONE this week. As always, look around, read, rate, comment, annotate.... Here are my picks for the week (no need to repeat the dinosaur paper here, of course): A Viscoelastic Deadly Fluid in Carnivorous Pitcher Plants: Carnivorous pitcher plants supplement…
This is not a world of reality TV, fashion, big-screen sport and daily newspapers, but one covered in seas, mountains, forests, ferns, beetles, frogs and birds - get out there and look at it. The good thing about living in a country with a depauperate herpetofauna is that you can go out on a day…
Fossil Of 'Giant' Shrew Nearly One Million Years Old Found In Spain: Morphometric and phylogenetic analyses of the fossilised remains of the jaws and teeth of a shrew discovered in a deposit in Gran Dolina de Atapuerca, in Burgos, have shown this to be a new species (Dolinasorex glyphodon) that has…