Areas deforested in Brazil increased from 152 000 km_ in 1976 to 517 000 km_ in 1996. That figure is the equivalent of the surface area of France. Deforestation is a complex process and involves a host of changing and widely differing situations. The factors behind it are many and varied. They include rising demand for agricultural land, international trade needs for timber and political decisions regarding strategic planning and development.

Researchers of the IRD Space Unit conducted an i

Three new studies by researchers at UC Davis Cancer Center provide new pieces to the puzzle of why some prostate cancers become resistant to androgen suppression therapy. The studies were presented Sunday afternoon at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Urological Association.

Of the nearly 190,000 men in the United States who develop prostate cancer every year, a substantial proportion will require androgen suppression therapy to reduce levels of male hormones — a treatment that can sh

Scientists have finally laid hands on the first member of a recalcitrant group of proteins called the Wnts two decades after their discovery. Important regulators of animal development, these proteins were suspected to have a role in keeping stem cells in their youthful, undifferentiated state – a suspicion that has proven correct, according to research carried out in two laboratories at Stanford University Medical Center. The ability to isolate Wnt proteins could help researchers grow some types of

A team of researchers headed by Douglas R. Cavener, professor and head of the Department of Biology at Penn State University, has announced important findings about the causes of three human diseases: severe, juvenile-onset diabetes; osteoporosis; and Wolcott-Rallison Syndrome, a rare condition whose sufferers exhibit a combination of diabetes, retarded growth, and skeletal abnormalities. Their work suggests promising lines of research for the therapeutic treatment of these diseases. The work will be

A recent study by a team of Syracuse University geologists has punched holes in a relatively new theory of species evolution called coordinated stasis; the theories involved are based on findings from fossil-bearing rocks that underlie Central New York. The SU study was published in “Geology,” the premier journal of the Geological Society of America.
First proposed in 1995 by Carl Brett of the University of Cincinnati and Gordon Baird of the State University of New York at Fredonia, coordinated

Contrary to prevailing wisdom concerning one of the most famous textbook examples of a tightly co-evolved mutualism, not every fig species is pollinated by its own unique wasp species. In this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Drude Molbo, postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and collaborators report that two genetically distinct species of wasps are present in at least half of the fig species surveyed.

This new result forces a major