By 1992, environmental activist Jeremy Rifkin claimed, we would achieve Peak Oil. Fossil fuels would begin to decline. Rifkin was just going by an environmental press release but Peak Oil had a long history; almost as long as oil itself.

In 1919, the chief geologist of the United States Geological Survey, said Peak Oil would happen within 3 years, while King Hubbert of Shell Oil predicted in 1956 that Peak Oil would happen by 1971. So by 1992 those claims were only working with a new generation of people who didn't understand science. In reality, math models containing all those variables are unlikely to be right. 

A research team including Professor William Laurance from James Cook University has discovered there has been a catastrophic decline in global wilderness areas during the past 20 years.

The team showed that since the 1990s, one-tenth of all global wilderness has vanished--an area twice the size of Alaska. The Amazon and Central Africa have been hardest hit.

The findings underscore an urgent need for international policies to recognise the value of wilderness and to address unprecedented threats to it, the researchers said.

"Environmental policies are failing the world's vanishing wildernesses," said Professor Laurance.

Today's industrial yeast strains are used to make beer, wine, bread, biofuels, and more, but their evolutionary history is not well studied. In a Cell paper publishing September 8, researchers describe a family tree of these microbes with an emphasis on beer yeast. The resulting genetic relationships reveal clues as to when yeast was first domesticated, who the earliest beer brewers were, and how humans have shaped this organism's development.

"The flavor of the beer we drink largely depends on yeast," explains Kevin Verstrepen, a yeast geneticist at the University of Leuven and VIB in Belgium. "We're drinking the best beers now because ancient brewers were smart enough to start breeding yeast before they knew what they were doing. It was really an art."

Ants visually track the motion of objects as they move through their environment in order to determine the distance they have traveled, a new study reports. Such tracking, called optic flow, has been observed in a number of insects but was thought to be used only minimally by ants. Now, results by Sarah Elisabeth Pfeffer and Matthias Wittlinger suggest that certain ants can rely solely on optic flow to find their way back to their nest when lost. Here, they studied Cataglyphis bicolor desert ants, which exhibit unique behaviors; namely, experienced forager ants carry interior nest workers, who are much less familiar with the outdoor environment, between different nest sites.

Researchers have developed a large culturing device to track the evolution of bacteria as they mutate in the presence of antibiotics, revealing that, surprisingly, the fittest mutants were not those most likely to infiltrate higher antibiotic concentrations. Instead, bacteria "behind" the very fittest on the growth plate became capable of surviving at highest antibiotic concentrations. The results provide important insights into the evolutionary patterns and mechanisms that drive bacteria's success in overcoming antibiotics, a phenomenon that threatens human health worldwide.

The human microbiota -- the entirety of bacteria which live e.g. on the skin or in the intestinal tract -- has an unknown influence on health. A team led by Prof. Tilo Biedermann, the director of the Clinic for Dermatology and Allergology at Rechts der Isar Hospital, examined the role microbiota plays in the digestive system in the case of food allergies and found that they may also play a role in determining the strength of anaphylactic reactions to food allergens. 

RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Released on Sept. 4, 1957, Ford dubbed its Edsel "the car of the future." It was designed to stand out, but most people didn't like the way it looked. Add "ugly" to a laundry list of problems from poor performance to a high price tag and the car tanked--its only lasting legacy being a lesson in how not to develop a product.

But what does the ideal car look like?

University of California, Riverside professor Subramanian "Bala" Balachander and his collaborators explored that question in a study that is forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing. Balachander is the Albert O. Steffey Chair and Professor of Marketing at UCR's School of Business.

A new car is a big expense for anyone -- but it will cost some people more than others, even at the same dealership.

A new U of T study, which is the first of its kind to reliably show large differences in the price paid for a new car, reveals that age and even in some cases gender can be a factor.

"We were surprised by the magnitude of the difference in how much people paid for an identical car that was bought in the same month in even the same city," says Ambarish Chandra, Assistant Professor of Business Economics in U of T Scarborough's Department of Management and the Rotman School of Management.