We're all aware of the concept of an ecological food niche and a web that extends from it - but it is pretty simplistic and easily leads to claims that if species X is used too much, we are doomed. Literate people know that 99.999% of species had gone extinct and we never even knew they existed.

But some are more important than others and so researchers have taught to make that abstract concept real. Biologists in a new paper outlined the position of fourteen fish species in relationship to their food in a four-dimensional food diagram. 

A new systematic review says that no-take zones in Belize are helping rebuildeconomically valuable species such as lobster, conch, and fish - and perhaps also helping to re-colonize nearby reef areas.

The literature in the review was from no-take areas around the world.

According to other papers, the recovery of lobster, conch, and other exploited species within marine protected areas with no-take zones, or fully protected reserves, could take as little as 1-6 years. Full recovery of exploited species, however, could take decades.
 

Dan Spielman, a Yale computer scientist, wanted to model complex online communities like Facebook, hoping to gain insight into how they form and interact. That's one of the precepts of Science 2.0, understanding how people can participate and scientists can collaborate without being drowned in a lot of 'noise' before being put on the right path to either.

A colleague in Jerusalem observed that aspects of Spielman’s research brought to mind a math problem that had been stumping people since Dwight Eisenhower was in office — the Kadison-Singer math problem. The 1950s? A puzzle that wasn't even from a paper, but from the “Related Questions” section of a paper on extensions of pure states? 

Since stem cell research became common 50 years ago, scientists have been trying to unravel mechanisms that guide function and differentiation of blood stem cells, those cells that generate all blood cells including our immune system.

Study of human blood stem cells is challenging because they can only be found in the bone marrow in specialized "niches" that cannot be recapitulated in a culture dish.

You never see them in calendars, but there are obese firefighters - and they don't get told to lose weight by their doctors.

As we all know, there are many healthy obese people, the notion that BMI is some magic button for diabetic and cardiovascular health has long been debunked. Regardless of their appearance, firefighters are trained to do a job. Can't pass training and you don't get to do the job. Yet firefighters do have high rates of obesity, compared to the nature of the job, and like the general public, heart attacks kill more firefighters than doing their job will.

We know that healthy mitochondria, the energy factories of cells, rely on proper reduction and oxidation to keep us converting food to energy and staving off mitochondrial pathologies. Any number of compounds have been created to try and keep that going as we age. They determine whether cells live or die and they regulate inflammation.