new program 24

How much do habitat protection, anti-trafficking laws, reintroductions, and other conservation efforts help save Earth's threatened animals? A huge international team of researchers recently attempted to answer this question for vertebrates, or animals with backbones. They discovered that without conservation, vertebrates would be declining 18 percent faster than they are now.

South Africa's Blombos Cave has yielded new evidence of early cultural advancement in our species.

Australia's Great Barrier Reef is home to one of the world's largest networks of marine protected areas. Like other marine reserves, large segments of the Great Barrier Reef have strict rules against human activities, such as fishing and polluting. New research shows that protected areas can help stop the decline of aquatic life-including fish and corals-and sometimes even increase their numbers. The evidence suggests that designating protected regions is an effective way to improve the outlook for marine life in the increasingly threatened ocean.

Between 2000 and 2002, the Chinese State Forestry Administration attempted to count every giant panda living in the temperate mountain forests of central China. The work revealed not only that nearly 1,600 pandas remain in the wild but also where, exactly, they reside. Although scientists have long been aware that pandas live only in isolated forest belts where bamboo grows, they were surprised to discover that pandas also prefer to live in old-growth forest—forest that has never been logged. The finding could help shape how the remaining panda habitat is protected.

The Antarctic Peninsula is a spit of land that extends off the continent toward South America. Its western side is, on average, warming five times faster than any other place on Earth. The warming is disintegrating the massive ice shelves that extend from the peninsula's land into the sea. As a result, a number species that depend on ice to survive are declining locally, including Antarctic krill and Adélie penguins, which eat krill. A new study led by Martin Montes-Hugo at the Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Science has uncovered that the local climate changes are also dramatically affecting the base of this food web: marine phytoplankton. Using satellite data and field research, Montes-Hugo and his colleagues have noted a dramatic 30-year drop in phytoplankton off the northwestern shore of the peninsula. The phytoplankton loss is likely contributing to the observed declines. Furthermore, some species that do not depend on ice moving into the region, flourishing, and further disrupting the food webs that have existed there historically.

A recent study led by neuroscientists at France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research has found that learning to read—no matter at what age—reorganizes the brain's neural networks. What's more, their findings suggest that literacy may improve the ability to understand spoken language.

Fungi have been invading ant brains for tens of millions of years.

Follow scientist-adventurer Lonnie Thompson to the 5,670-meter-high Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes. Thompson and his team from Ohio State University are racing to core a cylinder of 1,500-year-old ice to unravel the past climate patterns of this region - before our gradually warming climate melts this invaluable record away. By analyzing global ice cores, glaciologists like Thompson now have a well-preserved record for 150,000 years of climate history, allowing us to better predict future climate change.

Researchers from the universities of Florida and Winnipeg have reconstructed the brain of Ignacius graybullianus, one of the earliest primates known, from a 54-million-year-old fossil skull. It's the most complete brain model of its kind and casts new light on the beginnings of primate brain development.

Biologists from the Secretariat of the Pacific Community and Açores University in Portugal have learned that undersea peaks, called seamounts, support a wide variety of migratory fish species. Though it's still unknown exactly why these species tend to use seamounts as stopovers on their travels, the discovery makes seamounts attractive open-ocean locations to designate as protected areas.

Hantavirus is an infectious pathogen carried by rodents and occasionally passed to humans, where it can be deadly. A new study led by researchers from the University of New Mexico demonstrates that when rodent biodiversity decreases in Panamanian forests, the risk of hantavirus transmission in these ecosystems increase. Since deforestation can reduce species diversity, the findings have implications for people who live at the fringes of fragmented woodlands.

After examining brain-mapping studies of hundreds of autistic people, scientists from the University of Montreal in Canada and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have found distinct patterns that seem to underlie autistics' remarkable visual abilities.

New maps based on satellite observations of Earth reveal forests across the globe—where they are, and where they are declining. The boreal biome—the band of conifer forest in high latitudes—shows the greatest proportion of tree loss between 2000 and 2005, mostly due to lightning-induced fires. Of all nations, Brazil's forests saw the steepest decline. It is a hotspot of logging and fire-induced clearing in the tropical forest biome. The maps, which were produced by scientists from South Dakota State University and the State University of New York, allow forest monitoring in places that are difficult to access.

Tuberculosis can linger for years, but usually carries no symptoms. Scientists from the International Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in India suggest that this evasion tactic may involve stem cells.

New research led by scientists at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology confirms that a 40,000-year-old finger bone and tooth belong to a distinct group of humans. The Denisovans, named informally after the Siberian cave that contained the fossils, appear related to Neanderthals. The genetic analysis also shows a curious link between Denisovans and modern-day humans living in Melanesia.