COLLEGE STATION - Two Texas A&M University scientists highlighted the conservation benefits of ecotourism worldwide and said a recent research review citing the dangers of ecotourism to wildlife is premature and problematic.

Dr. Lee Fitzgerald, a conservation biologist, and Dr. Amanda Stronza, an anthropologist, published a critique of a recent review in the scientific journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution that proposed tourism may increase the vulnerability of wildlife to predators.

"There have been some claims that have drawn media attention, saying that nature tourism and ecotourism can hurt wildlife and can even make wildlife more vulnerable to predators and poaching," Fitzgerald said.

In the rush to solve mainstream media stories about airline passengers sitting on the place on the tarmac for hours and hours, the U.S. Department of Transportation's 2010 Tarmac Delay Rule glossed over concerns that it would lead to more delays and cancellations - exactly what has happened.

As a result, it takes most air passengers far more time to reach their destination for all pasangers than ever occurred for a few during lengthy tarmac delays, according to a study in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice.

Following a heart attack or other heart trauma, the heart is unable to replace its dead cells. Patients are often left with little option other than heart transplants, which are rarely available, or more recently cell therapies that transplant heart cells into the patient's heart. In far too many cases, however, the transplanted heart cells do not engraft well, resulting in poor recovery.

Trophy hunting shouldn't be banned but instead it should be better regulated to ensure funds generated from permits are invested back into local conservation efforts, according to a new paper co-authored by a leading University of Adelaide conservation ecologist.

Professor Corey Bradshaw, from the University of Adelaide's Environment Institute, along with Enrico Di Minin from the University of Helsinki and Nigel Leader-Williams from the University of Cambridge, argue that banning trophy hunting would do more harm than good in African countries that have little money to invest in critical conservation initiatives.

We age because the cells in our bodies begin to malfunction over the years. This is the general view that scientists hold of the ageing process. For example, in older people the cells' internal quality control breaks down. This control function usually eliminates proteins that have become unstable and lost their normal three-dimensional structure. These deformed proteins accumulate in the cells in a number of diseases, such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

Leading on from The Genome Analysis Centre's (TGAC) previous announcement of their new bread wheat genome assembly, the landmark resource is now publically available to download at the European Bioinformatics Institute's (EMBL-EBI) Ensembl database for full analysis.

The Ensembl Plants pre-site has issued the first release of the genome assembly of Triticum aestivum cv. Chinese Spring, generated by TGAC. This is the most complete and accurate bread wheat genome assembly to date with 91 per cent (98,974 genes) of the total genome annotated and assembled -- a total sequence length of 13.4GB.

Scientists are continually unearthing new facts about Homo sapiens from the mummified remains of Ötzi, the Copper Age man, who was discovered in a glacier in 1991.

Five years ago, after Ötzi's genome was completely deciphered, it seemed that the wellspring of spectacular discoveries about the past would soon dry up.

An international team of scientists have now succeeded in demonstrating the presence of Helicobacter pylori in Ötzi's stomach contents, a bacterium found in half of all humans today. The theory that humans were already infected with this stomach bacterium at the very beginning of their history could well be true. The scientists succeeded in decoding the complete genome of the bacterium.

Consider the engineering marvel that is your foot. Be it hairy or homely, without its solid support you'd be hard-pressed to walk or jump normally.

Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama, have identified a change in gene expression between humans and primates that may have helped give us this edge when it comes to walking upright. And they did it by studying a tiny fish called the threespine stickleback that has evolved radically different skeletal structures to match environments around the world.

EUGENE, Ore. -- Jan. 7, 2016 -- All it took was one mutation more than 600 million years ago. With that random act, a new protein function was born that helped our single-celled ancestor transition into an organized multicellular organism.

That's the scenario -- done with some molecular time travel -- that emerged from basic research in the lab of University of Oregon biochemist Ken Prehoda.

The mutation and a change it brought in protein interactions are detailed in eLife, an open-access journal launched in 2012 with support of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust.

A group of protein kinases have been found to play an important role in embryo development and may even be a potential cancer drug target, says research led by Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and the Francis Crick Institute, UK.

The study, published in Cell Reports, is the first description of knockouts of a whole family of protein kinases (PKN1-3) in mice and reveals roles in congenital birth defects such as spina bifida.

The team knocked out a whole kinase family but, unusually, only one member (PKN2) appeared to be important in development and warrants renewed attention.