Healthy men who report lower levels of the nutrient folate in their diets have higher rates of chromosomal abnormalities in their sperm, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Women of child-bearing age are encouraged to maintain adequate levels of folate in their diet, but the new findings, to be published Thursday, March 20, in the journal Human Reproduction, provide evidence that what men eat may also affect reproductive health.

When did rabbits and hares diverge in evolution? The answer just got a little clearer. Last spring, Johns Hopkins anatomy professor Kenneth Rose was displaying the bones of a jackrabbit’s foot as part of a seminar when he noticed something familiar about the shape of the bones.

That led to the discovery of the oldest known record of rabbits. The fossil evidence in hand, found in west-central India, predates the oldest previously known rabbits by several million years and extends the record of the whole category of the animal on the Indian subcontinent by 35 million years.

A lemur is a monkey-like animal with a long tail and large eyes. Analysis of the first hand bones belonging to an ancient lemur has revealed a mysterious joint structure that has scientists puzzled.

Pierre Lemelin, an assistant professor of anatomy at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and a team of fellow American researchers have analyzed the first hand bones ever found of Hadropithecus stenognathus, a lemur that lived 2,000 years ago.

The bones were discovered in 2003 in a cave in southeastern Madagascar, an island nation off the coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean. Hadropithecus is related to the modern-day sifaka, a type of lemur with acrobatic leaping skills.

Life on another planet? No, it's far too hot on HD 189733b for that, but the Hubble Space Telescope's first ever detection of an organic molecule in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star is big news. It's an important step in eventually identifying signs of life on a planet outside our Solar System.

Hubble found the tell-tale signature of methane in the atmosphere of the Jupiter-sized extrasolar planet HD 189733b. Under the right circumstances, methane can play a key role in prebiotic chemistry – the chemical reactions considered necessary to form life as we know it. Although methane has been detected on most of the planets in our Solar System, this is the first time any organic molecule has been detected on a world orbiting another star.

In oceanography studies, the iron needed to fertilize infrequent plankton blooms in High Nutrient, Low Chlorophyll (HNLC) regions was assumed to come almost entirely from wind-blown dust.

That's not the case in the North Pacific, say Phoebe Lam and James Bishop of the Earth Sciences Division at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

They report that the key source of iron in the Western North Pacific is not dust but the volcanic continental margins of the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kuril Islands.

The Arctic - pristine natural wilderness, unmolested by human touch? Not really. While early explorers claimed they could see 200 KM mountain peaks that certainly isn't the case today. In winter months, the Arctic actually has some of the dirtiest air in the world. It turns out even those early explorers may have been romanticizing the cleanliness a bit.

Scientists know that air pollution particles from mid-latitude cities migrate to the Arctic and form an ugly haze, but a new University of Utah study finds surprising evidence that polar explorers saw the same phenomenon as early as 1870.

“The reaction from some colleagues – when we first mentioned that people had seen haze in the late 1800s – was that it was crazy,” says Tim Garrett, assistant professor of meteorology and senior author of the study. “Who would have thought the Arctic could be so polluted back then? Our instinctive reaction is to believe the world was a cleaner place 130 years ago.”