Category Archives: Medicinal News

Protect forest elephants to conserve ecosystems, not DNA

Although it is erroneously treated as a subspecies, the dwindling African forest elephant is a genetically distinct species. New University of Illinois research has found that forest elephant populations across Central Africa are genetically quite similar to one another. Conserving this critically endangered species across its range is crucial to preserving local plant diversity in...

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How do marine mammals avoid the bends?

Deep-diving whales and other marine mammals can get the bends -- the same painful and potentially life-threatening decompression sickness that strikes scuba divers who surface too quickly. A new study offers a hypothesis of how marine mammals generally avoid getting the bends and how they can succumb under stressful conditions.

The key is the unusual lung...

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Planet's smallest microbes examined at nation's largest aquarium

More than 2 million people flock to Georgia Aquarium annually to see Ocean Voyager Built by Home Depot, the largest salt water habitat in the United States and home to whale sharks, the world's largest fish. But for microbiologists at Georgia Tech, the most significant attraction within this 6.3-million-gallon environment of aquatic life is the...

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Killer whale genetics raise inbreeding questions

A new genetic analysis of Southern Resident killer whales found that two male whales fathered more than half of the calves born since 1990 that scientists have samples from, a sign of inbreeding in the small killer whale population that frequents Washington's Salish Sea and Puget Sound.

Only about 26 of the 76 endangered whales in...

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