An ambitious, multi-disciplinary, 15-20 year program to fill in and flesh out the Tree of Life has just been launched by the National Science Foundation.
Field Museum scientists will help lead three of the seven grants recently awarded to researchers around the world to construct a new framework for understanding the evolutionary relationships between all species, extinct and living.

These three projects (listed below) will focus on birds, spiders, and archosaurs (birds, dinosaurs, pt

A group of researchers from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have designed a vaccine that might be used to protect against the pernicious consequences of severe sepsis, an acute and often deadly disease that is estimated to strike 700,000 Americans a year and millions more worldwide.

Though the new vaccine has not yet been applied to clinical trials in humans, it has worked well in preclinical studies, the results of which the team reports in the latest issue of the journal Angewandte

Analysis of long-term changes in Pacific Ocean temperatures may provide additional data with which to evaluate global warming hypotheses.

“Abrupt changes in water temperatures occurring over intervals of up to 25 years suggest that global warming may result as much from natural cyclical climate variations as from human activity,” said Benjamin Giese, oceanography professor in the College of Geosciences.

“Climate models constructed here at Texas A&M University were used to a

Before developers decide to make the desert bloom, they better take a look at what’s under the surface of the Earth.

That’s the conclusion of research by Texas A&M University geologist Mohamed Aly, who’s using GIS (geographic information systems) techniques to conduct engineering geomorphology assessments of some of Egypt’s newest urban developments to predict – and thus avoid – foundation problems stemming from instabilities in the underlying bedrock.

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Paper published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences

Below is an advisory distributed today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper can be found in the online early edition of PNAS at www.pnas.org.

The study, conducted by Dr. Cassian Yee, a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, involved 10 people diagnosed with advanced melanoma. For each patient immune system cells able to identify and target melanoma wer

A first in Canada, the Alberta Research Council (ARC) reached a milestone in the technical development of its own version of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) technology. ARC scientists are developing a proprietary micro solid oxide fuel cell (µ-SOFC) source of energy for small-scale portable applications such as laptops or personal digital assistants (PDAs).

“This is an important milestone as we pursue our strategic initiative in fuel cell technologies,” says John Zhou, manager, Advanced Materi