Miles of linked habitat sounds like a good thing - until the ants show up.

Environmentalists who promote the notion of unintended consequences regarding genetic modification never considered that wildlife corridors might have risks also - but they do, as a recent study showed. Julian Resasco and colleagues at the University of Florida found that one type of fire ant used wildlife corridors to dominate recently created landscapes.

"Although habitat corridors are usually beneficial, they occasionally have negative effects," Resasco said."Sometimes they can help invasive species spread in exactly the same way they help native species."

In order to keep outwanted immigrants, the United States Department of Agriculture and California Department of Food and Agriculture joined efforts and built an online tool for identification - of alien and potentially invasive species from all over the world.

Scales are small insects that feed by sucking plant juices. They can attack nearly any plant and cause serious damage to many agricultural and ornamental plants. While native scales have natural enemies that generally keep their populations in check, invasive species often do not, and for this reason many commercially important scale pests in the United States are species that were accidentally introduced.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a condition that causes painful inflammation of several joints in the body - the joint capsule becomes swollen, and the disease can also destroy cartilage and bone as it progresses. It affects 0.5% to 1% of the world's population and doctors have used various drugs to slow or stop the progression of the disease.

Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zurich)  researchers have developed a therapy that takes the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis in mice to a new level: after receiving the medication the animals have been fully cured.

A paper in Frontiers in Psychology says that 70 percent of faculty are non-tenure-track academics and they experience stress, anxiety, and depression due to their insecure job situation - in other words, they are stressed out about the exact same job situation everyone without a job for life that everyone in the world faces.

Adjunct titles, lecturers and instructors work under short-term contracts and have limited or no health and retirement benefits. Sometimes they are part-time and at different institutes simultaneously. 

Frogs, dogs, whales, snails can all do it, but humans and primates can't. Regrow nerves after an injury, that is — while many animals have this ability, humans don't. But new research from the Salk Institute suggests that a small molecule may be able to convince damaged nerves to grow and effectively rewire circuits. Such a feat could eventually lead to therapies for the thousands of Americans with severe spinal cord injuries and paralysis.

"This research implies that we might be able to mimic neuronal repair processes that occur naturally in lower animals, which would be very exciting," says the study's senior author and Salk professor Kuo-Fen Lee. The results were published in PLOS Biology.

Psychologists say they have developed and validated a new method to identify which people are narcissistic: just ask them.

In a series of 11 experiments involving more than 2,200 people of all ages, the researchers found they could reliably identify narcissistic people by asking them this exact question (including the note):

To what extent do you agree with this statement: "I am a narcissist." (Note: The word "narcissist" means egotistical, self-focused, and vain.)

Participants rated themselves on a scale of 1 (not very true of me) to 7 (very true of me).

How narcissistic are you? Take the test.