Madagascar represents only one percent of the earth's area but is home to about three percent of all animal and plant species on the planet - it has long been known as a hotspot of biodiversity.

New research in Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests the island's heyday of species development may be all but over. 

The basics of how a muscle generates power are this: Filaments of myosin tugging on filaments of actin shorten, or contract, the muscle. Since the 1950s physiologists have had a formula – the length-tension curve – that accurately describes the force a muscle exerts at all points from fully outstretched, when every weight lifter knows there is little strength, to the middle points that display the greatest force, to the completely shortened muscle when, again, strength is minimized.

The assumption for 50 years has been that the power comes primarily from what's happening straight up and down the length of the muscle.

Sexual reproduction is costly.

For starters, only half of the population can bear offspring so the other half has to work hard to make sure they're included in the future gene pool.

Yet there is a payoff beyond the sex jokes sure to follow that statement. Sexual reproduction allows the mixing of parental genomes to generate potentially beneficial new combinations of gene variants that had not previously coexisted on the same strand of DNA, or to separate beneficial mutations from detrimental ones. 

There was a period of time when hunters were the greatest conservationists.  Think President Teddy Roosevelt, who evangelized national parks and setting aside wilderness for the public.

Later, environmentalism became an occupation for urbanites and they distanced themselves from sportsmen and people who enjoyed nature - they even listed them as enemies, in the case of hunting and fishing. 

It was once believed that crazy ladies acquired a lot of cats. Then it was discovered that a lot of cats instead created crazy ladies; cat poop is laden with an infectious parasite known as Toxoplasma gondii, a protozoan that has recently caused toxoplasmosis epidemics in people. At first it was just schizophrenia in older women, but then broadened out to pregnant women and all people with immune deficiencies. 

Once any link is established some will connect it to obsessive-compulsive disorder and kids' trouble in school, so maybe things have gone overboard in blaming, but Toxoplasma gondii can still be a real concern. Each year in the United States, cats deposit about 1.2 million metric tons of feces into the environment.

Next-generation hydrogels can form synthetic scaffolds to support the formation of replacement tissues and organs in the emerging area of regenerative medicine.

Embedding peptides into the hydrogels stimulates the growth of essential microvascular networks to ensure a good blood supply.  A new paper describes the technology in which hydrogels functionalized with laminin-derived peptides were transplanted in a mouse cornea and were shown to support cell growth and blood vessel formation.