The green of a tree's leaves is from the larger proportion of the chlorophyll pigment in the leaves.  As days get shorter, less chlorophyll is  produced and green is no longer dominant because yellow xanthophylls and orange carotenes are also present in the chloroplasts.

But why will the leaves of some trees be red in America yet yellow in Europe?  

Did late Lower Paleolithic people hunt or were they scavengers?    A University of Arizona anthropologist says that humans living at a Paleolithic cave site (Qesem Cave) in central Israel between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago were as successful at big-game hunting as were later stone-age hunters at the site, but earlier humans shared meat differently.

Qesem Cave ("Qesem" means "surprise") people hunted cooperatively, then carried the highest quality body parts of their prey to the cave, where they cut the meat with stone blade cutting tools and cooked it with fire.

Garter snakes like to eat newts. Newts don't like to be eaten, and to deter snakes from eating them, they have evolved a seriously lethal neurotoxin. This toxin, called tetrodotoxin (TTX), is chemically similar to that found in pufferfish, and a few milligrams is enough to take out a hefty adult human.

But some garter snakes really like newts, and instead of searching for other prey, several species of garter snakes have managed develop resistance to newt neurotoxins.

PALO ALTO, California, August 10 /PRNewswire/ --

- Proof of Concept Study Investigating NS4B-RNA Binding Inhibitor

Eiger BioPharmaceuticals, Inc., a biotechnology company developing antiviral therapies, announced today that the first patients have been dosed in an innovative clinical trial in patients chronically infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV). The trial, run in centers in Australia and New Zealand, will investigate the antiviral effect of clemizole monotherapy in the absence of interferon.

LONDON, August 11 /PRNewswire/ -- The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPSGB) has called on the Prime Minister to introduce parity between nurses and pharmacists in the prescribing of controlled drugs.

In its evidence to the Prime Minister's Commission on the Future of Nursing and Midwifery, the RPSGB points to the existing discrepancy between the ability of nurses to prescribe controlled drugs in certain conditions as independent prescribers, when pharmacist independent prescribers cannot so prescribe, even when the medicine in question is a controlled drug which they can sell as ingredients in over the counter medicines.

HONG KONG and LAKE ZURICH, Illinois, August 12 /PRNewswire/ --

Fenwal, Inc. of Lake Zurich, Illinois, and Golden Meditech (stock code: 801.HK) of Hong Kong, announced today they have agreed to form a joint venture in China to focus on blood collection and transfusion products for the fast-growing Chinese medical market.

The transaction is expected to be completed in early 2010, subject to the signing of a definitive agreement and other customary company and regulatory conditions.

CRANBURY, New Jersey, August 12 /PRNewswire/ --

- BlackLight Power Physics Grand Slam: Power, Hydrinos, Light Signature, Theory Prediction Validated

BlackLight Power, Inc. (BLP) today announces that scientists at Rowan University have for the first time independently formulated and tested fuels that on demand generated energy greater than that of combustion at power levels of kilowatts using BLP's proprietary solid-fuel chemistry capable of continuous regeneration. Operating power systems using BLP's chemistry, Rowan University professors have reported a net energy gain of up to 6.5 times the maximum energy potential of the materials in the system from known chemical reactions.

LONDON, August 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Commenting on last night's BBC Three documentary which followed the lives of three young people living with Autism and Asperger syndrome ('The Autistic Me', BBC Three, 9pm, 11th August 2009), Lesa Walton - Care Development Director of specialist Autism care provider Brookdale Care - said today:

The programme makers and especially the three young people living with Autism and Asperger syndrome featured in the documentary are to be congratulated on aiding public understanding of Autism and associated Autistic Spectrum Conditions (ASC), which affect one in every hundred people in the UK.

FOLSOM, California, August 12 /PRNewswire/ -- On Monday, August 17th at 1:30PM in Hensill Hall 113, attendees of the 90th Annual Pacific Division Meeting of the AAAS in San Francisco will get to learn about the latest efforts in science communication from some of the brightest minds in the field.

The symposium is called Good Science is Only Part of the Job: Communicating Science to the Public. (Online link: http://www.sou.edu/aaaspd/2009SANFRANCISCO/Symposia09.html#15).

Treelines are not responding to global warming the way previous projections said they should, according to the first global quantitative assessment of the relationship between warming and treeline advance published in Ecology Letters.

The study tests the consensus that treelines have been globally advancing in response to the warming climate since 1900.