A new understanding of how plants manage their internal calcium levels could potentially lead to genetically engineering plants to avoid damage from acid rain, which robs soil of much of its calcium.

"Our findings should help scientists understand how plant ecosystems respond to soil calcium depletion and design appropriate strategies to protect the environment," said Zhen-Ming Pei, a Duke University assistant professor of biology who led the study, to be published in the Friday, March 9, issue of the journal Science.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Xiamen University in China.

Calcium enters plants dissolved within the water that roots take in from surrounding soil.

If yours is a mind philosophically bent on pondering the future of humanity, especially the future that awaits us in the next 30 or so years, then you may have come across the thought in your own mind that we are becoming more "god like," as we progress. You may have thought that this is a useful idea to explore, and that it might give you some insight to what lies ahead. The definition of god that I typically like to use is that which is omnipotent. Humanity is becoming more powerful all the time.

  
For those of you who have been following my entries, I have been focusing primarily 
on the big question of consciousness.  What is it?  What causes it?  I beleive the 
answers are coming soon, so I think that rabid discussion about it needs to start 
taking place. It's no longer a matter of pure philosophy.    And to encourage this, 
I am going to use this article to propose a thought experiment that exposes a 
little of how we think about consciousness.
 

A few years ago I started the process of buying a second home in a warm part of the United States.  Living in Chicago, I wanted to find a place that, through the years would be where I would spend an increasing amount of time during the winter months.  The first step in this process was looking at the various real estate web sites that displayed listings in the Southwest and in Florida, where the weather usually stays above freezing.

My mouse farm!

Today,after endless finessing, I finally got word that I will be getting my own mice. My own lab mice. To observe. At home.

How do female chimps make sure they only get the best mates? By never wanting to reproduce at the same time, insuring that none of them have to settle for less.

Female chimpanzees may have found a fool-proof way to ensure they mate with only the highest ranking males, namely those with important social and physical characteristics that their offspring may inherit, according to a new study by Akiko Matsumoto-Oda from the Department of Welfare and Culture at Okinawa University in Japan. Female chimpanzees do not synchronize their reproductive activities which reduces the opportunities for less-desirable males to coerce them into mating.

Something about normal, run-of-the-mill plants limits their reach upward. There's been no way to create that magical beanstalk in the fairy tales but no one knows why. For more than a century, scientists have tried to find out which part of the plant both drives and curbs growth: is it a shoot's outer waxy layer? Its inner layer studded with chloroplasts? Or the vascular system that moves nutrients and water? The answer could have great implications for modern agriculture, which desires a modern magical bean or two.

Now, in the March 8 issue of the journal Nature, researchers in the Plant Biology Laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies provide the answer.

New findings by a Queen's University research team dispel the popular notion that eating so-called "natural" foods will protect against cancer.

In fact, certain types of common foods and alcoholic beverages such as wine, cheese, yogurt and bread contain trace amounts of carcinogens. Maintaining a balanced diet from a variety of sources – including garlic – is a better choice, the researchers suggest.

Led by Dr. Poh-Gek Forkert of Queen's Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, the team has discovered that a naturally-occurring carcinogen found in alcoholic beverages and fermented foods causes DNA modification and mutations, ultimately leading to abnormal cell growth and lung cancer. Her research also shows that a component of garlic significantly reduces these changes.

A team of European astronomers offer new evidence that high-mass stars could form in a similar way to low-mass stars, that is, from accretion of gas and dust through a disk surrounding the forming star. Their article, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, reports the discovery of a jet of molecular hydrogen arising from a forming high-mass star located in the Omega nebula (M17). This detection confirms the hypothesis based on their earlier discovery that this forming high-mass star is surrounded by a large accretion disk.

A new report, the first to take a comprehensive look at market competition between wild and farmed salmon, sheds new light on the contentious and complex issues surrounding farmed and wild salmon.

The Great Salmon Run: Competition Between Wild and Farmed Salmon, released by TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network of World Wildlife Fund and IUCN-the World Conservation Union identifies two important trends that have remade the salmon industry in the last 25 years: farmed salmon has grown from just two percent of the world supply in 1980 to 65 percent in 2004. About three-fourths of the fresh and frozen salmon consumed in the United States is now farmed.