Ghana News asks why there's been no Australian-African summits held? Good question.
Conservation Bytes discusses and links to the classic "Biodiversity Hotspot" paper. It's still a disputed notion.
A forthcoming paper in PNAS (heh. You said "pnas") discusses a technical problem with DNA Barcoding. Apparently the assays pick up pseudogenes that are similar enough to the COXII mt genes to register but which have evolved by drift and random mutation so they give a false positive for a "novel" species.
PLoS Biology has a lovely memoir of Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA and died working on the problem of consciousness.
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The Crick memoir is indeed a fascinating obituary-cum-(what? explanation of a research program?).
One nitpick:
"From James Watson's and his [Crick's] early work, the structure of DNA explained the α, the origins of life."
I don't know if they really meant this, but the DNA structure discovery doesn't have much to do with abiogenesis, if I understand correctly (not being a scientist).
But anyway, didn't Daniel Dennett solve the problem in Consciousness Explained? (Just kidding).