In Bad For Carbon Offsets - Not All Trees Are The Same At Reducing Global Warming, scientists noted that planting new trees as an emotional panacea for greenhouse gas emissions - that means you, Burning Man Festival - didn't really do much good.

Now the single largest assessment of the biodiversity conservation value of primary, secondary and plantation forests ever conducted in the humid tropics adds new weight to the debate.

Working in the north-eastern Brazilian Amazon an international team of scientists funded by the UK Government’s Dar

Clinicians from the USC School of Dentistry have made the first epidemiological study of oral cancer in California and detailed a connection between the incidence of oral cancer and race and ethnicity.

Dr. Satish Kumar and Dr.Parish Sedghizadeh, clinical professors in the school’s Division of Diagnostic Sciences, went through 20 years of records from the California Cancer Registry (CCR)— the state’s cancer surveillance database — for the incidence rates of invasive squamous cell carcinoma, the most common form of oral cancer.

Up to two-thirds of oral cancers are caused by tobacco or alcohol use, according to the Oral Cancer Foundation.

When ancient retroviruses slipped bits of their DNA into the primate genome millions of years ago, they successfully preserved their own genetic legacy. Today an estimated 8 percent of the human genetic code consists of endogenous retroviruses (ERVs)--the DNA remnants from these so-called "selfish parasites."

Surprisingly, the infected hosts and their primate descendants also appear to have benefited from this genetic invasion, new evidence suggests. The ancient retroviruses--distant relatives of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)--helped a gene called p53 become an important "master gene regulator" in primates, according to a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The first “State of the Carbon Cycle Report” for North America, released online this week by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, finds the continent’s carbon budget increasingly overwhelmed by human-caused emissions.

North American sources release nearly 2 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, mostly as carbon dioxide. Carbon “sinks” such as growing forests may remove up to half this amount, but these current sinks may turn into new sources as climate changes.

“By burning fossil fuel and clearing forests human beings have significantly altered the global carbon cycle,” says Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, one of the report’s lead authors.

A comparison of illness and death rates for 13 vaccine-preventable diseases in the U.S., before and after use of the vaccine, indicates there have been significant decreases in the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths for each of the diseases examined, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Assocation.

In the United States, vaccination programs have made a major contribution to the elimination of many vaccine-preventable diseases and significantly reduced the incidence of others.

“Vaccine-preventable diseases have societal and economic costs in addition to the morbidity and premature deaths resulting from these diseases—the costs include missed time from school and work, physician office visits, and hospitalizations,” the authors write.

Whereas most birds are sole proprietors of their nests, some tropical species “time share” together – a discovery that helps clear up a 150-year-old evolutionary mystery, says Queen’s University Biology professor Vicki Friesen.

The Queen’s-led international study confirms one of Charles Darwin’s more controversial theories – first put forward in 1859 and since disputed by many experts – that different species can arise, unhindered, in the same place. Others believe that a geographic barrier such as a mountain or a river is required to produce two separate species.

Although focused on how species change over time through natural selection, Darwin’s landmark book, The Origin of Species, also speculates that it is possible for different species to develop in the same place.