Results from field research supported by Earthwatch, the international environmental charity, will help scientists predict threats to wildlife should climate change result in a sea level rise in the Baltic.

During the six year research programme, coordinated by Earthwatch scientists Drs. Chris Joyce and Niall Burnside (University of Brighton), and Elle Puurmann (NGO Läänerannik), monitoring stations were installed in Vormsi Island, Silma Nature Reserve and Matsalu National Park, some of the best coastal wetlands in Estonia for nature conservation. The stations’ data loggers recorded water levels and soil moisture. Bird life was also recorded at fixed locations.

A comprehensive new study documents in detail the dynamics of parts of Greenland’s ice sheet, important data that have long been missing from the ice sheet models on which projections about sea level rise and global warming are based.

The research is published this month in the Journal of Glaciology, also demonstrates how remote sensing and digital imaging techniques can produce rich datasets without field data in some cases.

Traditionally, ice sheet models are very simplified, according to Beata Csatho, Ph.D., assistant professor of geology and lead author of the paper. The implications of these richer datasets may be dramatic, Csatho said, especially as they impact climate projections and sea-level rise estimates, such as those made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The traditional idea of the balance of nature gets quite a beating by a study that appears in the current issue of Nature. Using a long-term laboratory experiment, the authors conclude that, even under constant conditions, all species in a food web continued to fluctuate in a chaotic fashion. Chaos makes long-term prediction of species abundances impossible.

Theoretical ecologists already argued in the 1970s that populations of plants and animals might fluctuate in an unpredictable manner, even without external influences. These predictions, derived from chaos theory, attracted a lot of debate. However, only few scientists believed that species in real ecosystems would truly fluctuate in a chaotic fashion.

Contrary to some reports, the epilepsy drug oxcarbazepine does not appear to prevent migraine, according to research published in the February 12, 2008, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

The nearly five-month study involved 170 men and women at clinics across the United States with half of the group receiving a daily dose of oxcarbazepine; the other half took placebo. Both groups included people who had three to nine migraine attacks within a month.

Researchers found no difference between the oxcarbazepine and placebo groups in the change in the number of migraine attacks from the beginning to the end of the study.

A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims to have solved this scientific riddle by analysing the genomics of primitive living fishes such as sharks and lampreys and their spineless relatives, such as the sea squirts.

Vertebrates - animals such as humans that possess a backbone - are the most anatomically and genetically complex of all organisms, but explaining how they achieved this complexity has vexed scientists since the conception of evolutionary theory.

New research from the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute shows that an interaction between fetal brain cells and maternal antibodies could be linked with the repetitive behavior – also called stereotypies – that is characteristic of autism. While additional studies are needed to confirm the outcome, this result leads investigators to suspect that brain-directed antibodies during the prenatal period could be a causal factor for the disorder. The study appears online now and will be published in a future issue of Brain, Behavior and Immunity.

The study builds on recent research led by UC Davis immunologist Judy Van de Water (to be published in the March 2008 issue of Neurotoxicology) showing that IgG antibodies from the blood of mothers of children with autism react against fetal brain proteins. The outcome was predominant with IgG samples from mothers of children with the regressive form, rather than the early onset form, of the disorder. Her outcome raised the possibility that some cases of autism may be linked to antibody transplacental transfer during pregnancy which, in turn, affects the growing brain.