Huge colonies of seabirds accustomed to nesting on islands free of predators began disappearing when fur traders started introducing foxes onto islands in the Aleutian archipelago in the 18th century. The ground-nesting birds made easy meals for the foxes. A study published this week in the journal Science now shows that the effects of the introduced foxes rippled through entire island ecosystems, transforming the vegetation from lush grasslands to scrubby, low-growing tundra.

In a stunning example of evolution at work, scientists have now found that changes in a single gene can produce major changes in the skeletal armor of fish living in the wild.

The surprising results, announced in the March 25, 2005, issue of journal Science, bring new data to long-standing debates about how evolution occurs in natural habitats.

Two species of tropical octopus have learned a neat trick to avoid predators - they lift up six of their arms and walk backward on the other two.

This first report of bipedal behavior in octopuses, written by University of California, Berkeley, researchers, will be published in the March 25 issue of Science.

A new study demonstrates the potential effectiveness of treating tumors by combining agents that damage DNA with a drug that sensitizes cancer cells to these agents.

Deficiencies of growth hormone and similar compounds may reduce cancer and kidney disease late in life, but also may lead to cartilage degeneration and impaired memory and learning ability, according to research at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and four other institutions.

Accurate diagnosis of cancer subtypes remains a challenging problem. Building classifiers based on gene expression data is a promising approach; yet the selection of non-redundant but relevant genes is difficult. The selected gene set should be small enough to allow diagnosis even in regular clinical laboratories and ideally identify genes involved in cancer-specific regulatory pathways. Here an entropy-based method is proposed that selects genes related to the different cancer classes while at the same time reducing the redundancy among the genes.

Fast-track recruitment has begun for a trial to investigate the safety of a vaccine against H5N1 avian influenza, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announced today.

Nanotechnology may be in its infancy, but biologists may soon use it to watch the inner workings of a living cell like never before. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have developed a way to sneak nano-sized probes inside cell nuclei where they can track life's fundamental processes, such as DNA repair, for hours on end.