An endangered monkey species in Tanzania is living in geographical pockets that are becoming isolated from one another. The situation, researchers say, is mostly driven by the monkeys’ proximity to villages and the deliberate burning of forests to make way for crops and pastures. An international team, led by Maria Jose Ruiz-Lopez, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oregon,…
Dramatic increases in exposure to toxic chemicals in the last four decades are threatening human reproduction and health, according to the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO), the first global reproductive health organization to take a stand on human exposure to toxic chemicals. The opinion was written by obstetrician-gynecologists and scientists from the major global, US, UK and Canadian…
Scientists at UC San Diego have discovered that planarians, commonly used in high-school biology labs to study regeneration and the primitive nervous system, are actually quite sophisticated when it comes to modeling the response of the developing human nervous system to potentially toxic chemicals. The researchers published their findings in the current issue of the journal Toxicological Sciences. “Because planarians…
Scientists at UC San Francisco and Brown University have figured out the likely way that white-nose syndrome breaks down tissue in bats, opening the door to potential treatments for a disease that has killed more than six million bats since 2006 and poses a threat to the agricultural industry. The fungus feeds itself by exporting digestive enzymes and then importing…
Fifteen chemicals that disrupt our endocrine hormonal systems have been linked to earlier menopause among US women. Amber Cooper from Washington University in St Louis, US, and colleagues found women aged 45 to 55 exposed to the organic compounds were up to six times more likely to be menopausal than unexposed peers. The substances include long-banned but persistent polychlorinated biphenyls…
ISG faculty, Dr. Jessica Lynch Alfaro, Dr. Michael E. Alfaro, et al, have published a paper titled “Biogeography of squirrel monkeys (genus Saimiri): South-central Amazon origin and rapid pan-Amazonian diversification of a lowland primate” in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. Abstract: The squirrel monkey, Saimiri, is a pan-Amazonian Pleistocene radiation. We use statistical phylogeographic methods to create a mitochondrial DNA-based timetree for 118…