Calculating species extinction rates is a tricky business at the best of times, but a new research paper in Nature suggests the most widely used methods are “fundamentally flawed” and overestimate extinction rates by as much as 160 percent. Paper co-author Stephen Hubbell, a distinguished professor of ecology at UCLA, explained why he believed extinction […]
Teen suicide gets plenty of airtime, but a new American study finds that middle-aged whites, particularly women, are an emerging high-risk group. The study notes that the increase in the overall suicide rate between 1999 and 2005 was due primarily to an increase in suicides among whites aged 40 – 64, with white middle-aged women […]
Evolutionary change is generally considered to be a pedestrian affair, with changes occurring over millennia. But evolutionary biologists from Harvard have shown that natural selection can occur within months, as a population’s needs change. Their study, appearing in the journal Science, was based on populations of the lizard Anolis sagrei that inhabits cays (small islands) […]
