In a special issue, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment explores ecology in an era of globalization, looking at the impacts of human migration, production systems, and invasive species on ecosystems and people throughout North, Central, and South America. Scientists from throughout the Americas gathered last year in Merida Mexico and held a conference on this very topic. The following are highlights from the meeting, including more extensive work done since the event.

Combining diamond anvils and powerful lasers, laboratory researchers have developed a technique that should be able to squeeze materials to pressures 100 to 1,000 times greater than possible today, reproducing conditions expected in the cores of supergiant planets.

Until now, these pressures have only been available experimentally next to underground nuclear explosions.

There is renewed hope for treatment of a rare genetic condition, Progeria, that causes rapidly accelerated aging and leads to an average life expectancy of 13 years.

Scientists studying the genes of two infants who died of mysterious illnesses found the infants had mutations in LMNA, the same gene altered in patients with the premature aging condition. But the infants' unusual mutations caused them to make many more bad copies of the gene's primary protein, lamin A, than progeria patients.

Great Tits are, of course, songbirds - specifically Parus major. An international team of researchers have now found evidence for the existence of a "curiosity-gene" in our feathered friends.

The gene (Drd4) carries the building instructions for a receptor in the brain, which forms the docking station for the neurotransmitter dopamine. Birds with a specific variant of this dopamine receptor D4 gene show a stronger exploratory behaviour than individuals with other variants.

New observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have overturned conventional ideas about the early life of some massive globular clusters, showing that they can go through several periods of intense stellar formation rather than the previously accepted single burst. The analysis of Hubble data from the massive globular cluster NGC 2808 provides evidence that star birth occurred over three generations early in the cluster's life.

Collaborative research between scientists in the UK and USA has led to a major breakthrough in the understanding of antiferromagnets, published in this week's Nature. Scientists at the London Centre for Nanotechnology, the University of Chicago and the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory have used x-rays to see the internal workings of antiferromagnets for the very first time.