Overfished and under-protected: Oceans on the brink of catastrophic collapse

 

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/22/world/oceans-overfishing-climate-change/index.html?iid=article_sidebar

By Tom Levitt, for CNN

·         Healthy species-abundant oceans key to long-term human survival

·         Overfishing and climate change threaten to trash ocean eco-system

·         Bottom-trawling considered a highly damaging practice by marine scientists

·         Ocean acidification caused by climate change threatening to kill off vital coral reefs

(CNN) -- As the human footprint has spread, the remaining wildernesses on our planet have retreated. However, dive just a few meters below the ocean surface and you will enter a world where humans very rarely venture.

In many ways, it is the forgotten world on Earth. A ridiculous thought when you consider that oceans make up 90% of the living volume of the planet and are home to more than one million species, ranging from the largest animal on the planet -- the blue whale -- to one of the weirdest -- the blobfish.

Remoteness, however, has not left the oceans and their inhabitants unaffected by humans, with overfishing, climate change and pollution destabilizing marine environments across the world.

Many marine scientists consider overfishing to be the greatest of these threats. The Census of Marine Life, a decade-long international survey of ocean life completed in 2010, estimated that 90% of the big fish had disappeared from the world's oceans, victims primarily of overfishing.

 

Fluorescent Neural Cells from Monkey Skin Mature Into Several Types of Brain Cells in Monkeys

Mar. 14, 2013 — For the first time, scientists have transplanted neural cells derived from a monkey's skin into its brain and watched the cells develop into several types of mature brain cells, according to the authors of a new study in Cell Reports. After six months, the cells looked entirely normal, and were only detectable because they initially were tagged with a fluorescent protein.

Picture shows a neuron, created in the Su-Chun Zhang lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, that makes dopamine, a neurotransmitter involved in normal movement. The cell originated in an induced pluripotent stem cell, which derive from adult tissues. Similar neurons survived and integrated normally after transplant into monkey brains—as a proof of principle that personalized medicine may one day treat Parkinson's disease. (Credit: Image courtesy Yan Liu and Su-Chun Zhang, Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin–Madison

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130314124605.htm

See OnLine English at http://www.oleng.com.au for superior English editing,
 TO IMPROVE ENGLISH CONVERSATION FOR BUSINESS AND PROFESSIONAL
 PURPOSES, GO TO
 < http://www.esl.oleng.com.au >

EVOLUTION IN REVERSE

Mar. 8, 2013 — In evolutionary biology, there is a deeply rooted supposition that you can't go home again: Once an organism has evolved specialized traits, it can't return to the lifestyle of its ancestors.

There's even a name for this pervasive idea. Dollo's law states that evolution is unidirectional and irreversible. But this "law" is not universally accepted and is the topic of heated debate among biologists.

Now a research team led by two University of Michigan biologists has used a large-scale genetic study of the lowly house dust mite to uncover an example of reversible evolution that appears to violate Dollo's law. Earlier examples cited include hip-hope music and people who are fans of reality television programmes.