Monthly Archives: January 2018

Enterococci are hardy microbes that thrive in the gastrointestinal tracts of nearly all land animals, including our own, and generally cause no harm. But their ruggedness has lately made them leading causes of multi-drug-resistant infections, especially in settings like hospitals where antibiotic use disrupts the natural balance of intestinal microbes.

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Human beings take up a lot of real estate -- around 50-70 percent of the Earth's land surface. And our increasing footprint affects how mammals of all sizes, from all over the planet, move.

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[unable to retrieve full-text content]Contrary to public perception, die-offs in honeybee colonies are an agricultural not a conservation issue, argue researchers, who say that manged honeybees may contribute to the genuine biodiversity crisis of Europe's declining wild pollinators....

[unable to retrieve full-text content]While it is largely believed that horses simply evolved with fewer digits, researchers pose a new theory that suggests remnants of all five toes are still present within the hooves of the horse....

A new paper appearing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B shows a varied collection of lizards throughout Asia to be unexpectedly close cousins of beach-dwelling mourning geckos, all descended from a common ancestor species that thrived along an ancient archipelago in the West Pacific that served as a "superhighway" of biodiversity.

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[unable to retrieve full-text content]Once abundant in Southern California, the foothill yellow-legged frog inexplicably vanished from the region sometime between the late 1960s and early 1970s. The reasons behind its rapid extirpation have been an ecological mystery....