Commercial fishing practices can reduce genetic diversity in fish populations, possibly threatening their productivity and adaptability to environmental change, new research has found.

An Australian zoologist now at the University of Melbourne, along with colleagues from the United Kingdom and New Zealand, was the first to record a decline in the genetic diversity of a commercially exploited marine species.

Their findings, published in the latest volume of the “Proceedings of the

Investment from the White Rose Technology Seedcorn Fund (WRTSF) – the venture capital fund owned by the universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York (UK) – has funded the completion of a series of significant technical milestones in the development of a new family of `immunologically-rational` adjuvants for vaccines, which are materially very different from the existing adjuvants based on aluminium salts and bacterial cell wall components.

Sheffield-based life science company Adjuvantix Ltd is

On the eve of the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, scientists at UCL have detected a flaw in the Kyoto protocol`s global plans to reduce the impact of global warming, all because of something as simple as atmospheric dust.

Dr Mark Maslin of UCL`s Environmental Change Research Centre explains: “Dust is vital to the health of the planet. This is not household dust, but tiny fragments of rock and soil, almost too small to see with the naked eye”.

Billions of tons of this dust are blown a

Study links body fat, cancer risk

Hispanic women have been known to run a lower risk of developing breast cancer than most other women, but their breast cancer rates are climbing—and increasing obesity is one factor that might be to blame.

The weight that Hispanic women gain during adulthood and their body fat may put them at greater risk for breast cancer both before and after menopause, according to researchers from the Keck School of Medicine of USC, the University of New

Researchers from the University of Chicago have identified a gene defect that causes the development of leukemia in children with Down syndrome. The discovery, scheduled for Advance Online Publication on Nature Genetics’s website on 12 August, could speed diagnosis and provide a new target for therapy.

Children with Down syndrome are 10 to 20 times as likely as unaffected children to develop leukemia. They most commonly develop a type known as acute megakaryoblastic leukemia (AMKL), wh

Two articles in the latest issue of Critical Care reveal how intensive care therapy may be beneficial in the short but not in the long term. Being treated in intensive care units may help critically ill patients survive but the quality of life – if they survive – is often severely impaired. It is unclear whether this impairment is a complication of the illness or a complication of therapy.

Many intensive care doctors believe the battle has been won once a patient leaves the intensive care u