Preliminary results from DNA analysis of wolverine scat samples collected on the Tahoe National Forest do not match those of historic California wolverine populations, according to U.S. Forest Service scientists.

Geneticists with the agency’s Rocky Mountain Research Station recently began analyzing samples, when wildlife biologists with the Tahoe National Forest and California Department of Fish and Game began sending hair and scat samples they collected from wolverine detection sites on the national forest to a lab in Missoula, Mont.

The interagency effort began in March after an Oregon State University graduate student working on a cooperative project with the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station photographed a wolverine, an animal whose presence has not been confirmed in California since the 1920s.

A biological process taught to every pupil studying science at high school has just become a little more complicated, thanks to a new discovery published today.

Scientists from the University of Bath have found that a protein called RASSF7 is essential for mitosis, the process by which a cell divides in two. In research published in the journal Molecular Biology of the Cell, they show that the protein is essential for building the microtubules that allow the two halves of the cell to slide apart.

“What makes mitosis so interesting is that it is one of the biological processes that everyone remembers from their days at school,” said Dr Andrew Chalmers from the University’s Department of Biology & Biochemistry.

The Sun has a very dynamic atmosphere, with huge fountains of hot gas erupting in the atmosphere, or corona, every few minutes, travelling at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour and reaching great heights.

A team of scientists using the Hinode spacecraft has been searching for the origin and driver of these 'fountains', immense magnetic structures that thread through the solar atmosphere. On Wednesday 2 April at the Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast (NAM 2008), team leader Dr. Michelle Murray from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL, University College London) presented the latest results from Hinode together with computer simulations that model conditions on the Sun.

Research published in the Institute of Physics' Environmental Research Letters shows how a team from Lancaster and Durham Universities sought a means to prove the correlation between the ionizing cosmic rays and the production of low cloud cover.

Previous research had shown a possible correlation, using the results of the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project, and this had been used to propose that global warming was due to cosmic rays.

The new research shows that change in cloud cover over the Earth does not correlate to changes in cosmic ray intensity. Neither does it show increases and decreases during the sporadic bursts and decreases in the cosmic ray intensity which occur regularly.

A daily dose of caffeine blocks the disruptive effects of high cholesterol that scientists have linked to Alzheimer's disease. A study in the Journal of Neuroinflammation revealed that caffeine equivalent to just one cup of coffee a day could protect the blood-brain barrier (BBB) from damage that occurred with a high-fat diet.

The BBB protects the central nervous system from the rest of the body's circulation, providing the brain with its own regulated microenvironment. Previous studies have shown that high levels of cholesterol break down the BBB which can then no longer protect the central nervous system from the damage caused by blood borne contamination. BBB leakage occurs in a variety of neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.

DNA repair capacity is an important factor in cancer, inflammation, aging, and other human conditions. Radiation is something we can never avoid and it's responsible for a lot of medical problems.

Bdelloid rotifers have been able to give up sex and escape the usual drawback of asexuality – extinction - and still survive because they have evolved an extraordinary efficient mechanism for repairing harmful mutations to their DNA, say the Marine Biological Laboratory’s David Mark Welch, Matthew Meselson, and their colleagues.

What’s more, they have done so over millions of years of evolution, resulting in at least 370 species.