Native small mammals on forest islands created by a large hydroelectric reservoir in Thailand faced extinction and a new paper says species living in rainforest fragments could be far more likely to disappear than was previously thought.

The authors draw parallels between logging and the islands created by hydroelectric power and say they were motivated by a desire to understand how long species can live in forest fragments. If they persist for many decades, this gives conservationists a window of time to create wildlife corridors or restore surrounding forests to reduce the harmful effects of forest isolation. 

The first scoop of soil analyzed by the analytical suite in the belly of NASA's Curiosity rover reveals that fine materials on the surface of the planet contain several percent water by weight. 

NASA's Curiosity Rover has sampled a surprising diversity of soils and sediments along a half-kilometer route during its first few months on Mars. And what it has found tells a complex story about the gradual desiccation of the Red Planet.

Perhaps most notable among findings from the ChemCam team is that all of the dust and fine soil contains small amounts of water.

In a series of papers covering the rover's top discoveries during its first three months on Mars, the rover's ChemCam instrument team up with an international cadre of scientists affiliated with the CheMin, APXS, and SAM instruments to describe the planet's seemingly once-volcanic and aquatic history.

 IGR J18245-2452, located about 18,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius in a cluster of stars known as M28, is a neutron star with the peculiar ability to transform from a radio pulsar into an X-ray pulsar and back again.

The star's capricious behavior appears to be fueled by a nearby companion star and may give new insights into the birth of millisecond pulsars.

I am 99.9% sure that there will never be commercial production of genetically engineered wine grapes ("GMO" to use the common misnomer). Even so, I'd like to indulge in imagining what could be if we lived in some parallel universe where rational scientific thinking prevailed.

New methods are needed to fight the infection Clostridium difficile and better use of antibiotics could be key, according to a new paper.

Clostridium difficile (C.diff) causes severe diarrhoea, cramps and sometimes life-threatening complications, and has traditionally been thought to be transmitted within hospitals from other sick C.diff patients.
 

In a United Kingdom study, the team mapped all cases of Clostridium difficile (C.diff) in Oxfordshire over a three-year period (2008 to 2011) and found that less than one in five cases of the "hospital superbug" were likely to have been caught from other hospital cases of C.diff, where the focus of infection control measures has been.