Illegal logging devours Honduran forests
China measures tackle bird flu
Mexico coral reef set back 100 years by Wilma
World Bank to offer bird-flu loans
Pilot tracks monarch butterflies on long migration
Marauders continue to plunder the oceans
Americans split over buying cloned meat: poll
Gloomy estimate of bird flu costs
Japan's whaling fleet sets sail
Hazards in the hunt for flu bug
Resurgent monarchs fluttering to Mexico

You might think it would be difficult for a terrorist to obtain genes from the smallpox virus, or a similarly vicious pathogen. Well, it's not. Armed with a fake email address, a would-be bioterrorist could probably order the building blocks of a deadly biological weapon online, and receive them by post within weeks.

Ron Pardini is not a medical doctor. Yet he is seen as a hero by his cancer-stricken neighbor, "D.H." Pardini helped the 78-year-old after D.H. was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and University Hospitals of Cleveland announced that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved plans to begin a study to evaluate the safety of using adult stem cells from bone marrow to treat chronic ischemia, a serious form of heart disease.

A study by a leading UK fertility centre has found that the numbers of men – especially students – coming forward as potential sperm donors fell sharply after 2000, almost certainly due to growing awareness that changes in the law would be removing the right to anonymity.

A multidisciplinary team consisting of researchers from McGill/MUHC and the CHUM have been awarded a grant of nearly $700,000 by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) to continue their groundbreaking research on pain suffered by some women during sexual intercourse. The new funding will allow the team, consisting of psychologists, gynecologists, physical therapists and statistician/epidemiologists, to root-out the cause of a condition experienced recurrently by at least 15% of Canadian women.

Researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Cancer have identified key characteristics in certain deadly brain tumors that make them 51 times more likely to respond to a specific class of drugs than tumors in which the molecular signature is absent.

For most people, just a whiff of food that has made them sick in the past is enough to trigger a wave of nausea – and to prevent them from eating that food again. It's a response that's instantaneous, involuntary, and so fundamental to basic biology that it occurs in a broad range of species. Even worms, researchers have now shown, quickly learn to avoid smells associated with foods that have made them ill.

A Brandeis University study published this week in Nature shows for the first time that a molecular signal maintains coherence among brain clock cells that regulate daily activity of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies). The two key groups of neurons control morning and evening activity and are maintained in synch even when the flies are plunged into darkness for extended periods of time.

Johns Hopkins' senior hospital epidemiologist and flu expert is calling for mandatory vaccination of all health care workers as the best means of protecting patients and hospital staff from widespread outbreaks of the viral illness. Studies by other United States researchers show that voluntary vaccination programs don't do the job and that each year, nearly 40,000 Americans die from influenza, many of them elderly or ill, with weakened immune systems that cannot readily fend off the disease.