Researchers have discovered that a virus commonly found in dogs may lead to a breakthrough in human vaccine development.

Parainfluenza virus 5, or PIV5, is harmless to humans but is thought to contribute to upper respiratory infections in dogs, and is a common target for canine vaccines designed to prevent kennel cough. In a new paper, researchers describe how this virus could be used in humans to protect against diseases that have eluded vaccine efforts so far.

Three new collembolan species have been discovered in the Maestrazgo caves in Teruel, Spain. Their description has been published in the Zootaxa journal and belong to one of the most ancient animal species on the planet. 

The Maestrazgo caves in Teruel are located in a region of the Iberian Range. It is an isolated region with average altitudes between 1,550 meters and 2,000 meters above sea level and and a climate only the Scottish could enjoy, with temperatures ranging from -40°C to -25°C. Inside the
Maestrazgo
caves, the temperatures are a more hospitable 5-11°C.

Berkeley, CA — The installed price of solar photovoltaic (PV) power systems in the United States fell substantially in 2011 and through the first half of 2012, according to the latest edition of Tracking the Sun, an annual PV cost-tracking report produced by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

The median installed price of residential and commercial PV systems completed in 2011 fell by roughly 11 to 14 percent from the year before, depending on system size, and, in California, prices fell by an additional 3 to 7 percent within the first six months of 2012. These recent installed price reductions are attributable, in large part, to dramatic reductions in PV module prices, which have been falling precipitously since 2008.

The percentage of Americans who say they are strong in their religious faith has been steady for the last four decades but a new sociology analysis claims that religious groups who have become more staunchly devout have surged while others, notably Roman Catholics, who have sought to become more liberal under Vatican II in that time, have faded in popularity.

Catholics now report the lowest proportion of strongly affiliated followers among major American religious traditions. The drop in intensity could present challenges for the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S., the study suggests, both in terms of church participation and in Catholics' support for the Church's social and theological positions.

What happens when the modern evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium collides with the older theory of mosaic evolution? That's the issue addressed by paleobiologists Melanie J Hopkins at the Museum fuer Naturkunde Berlin and Scott Lidgard at the Field Museum in Chicago.  

The race is on to blame everything related to ecological change on human footprints - even the past can be re-framed as anthropocenic climate change and University of Massachusetts Amherst geoscientists have shown how to do just that, by using a biomarker from human feces in a completely new way to establish the first human presence, the arrival of grazing animals and human population dynamics in a landscape.