Experts in ancient DNA from McMaster University (Canada) have teamed up with genome researchers from Penn State University (USA) for the investigation of permafrost bone samples from Siberia. The project also involved paleontologists from the American Museum of Natural History (USA) and researchers from Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. The researchers' report on the first genomic sequences from a woolly mammoth will be published on 22 December 2005 by the journal Science on the Science Express website, http://www.sciencexpress.org.

A team of researchers has proposed new limits on the time when the most recent common ancestor of humans and their closest ape relatives -- the chimpanzees -- lived. Scientists at Arizona State and Penn State Universities have placed the time of this split between 5 and 7 million years ago -- a sharper focus than that given by the previous collection of molecular and fossil studies, which have placed the divergence anywhere from 3 to 13 million years ago.

By introducing expression of a special green-algae gene into neurons of the tiny, transparent nematode C. elegans, researchers have been able to elicit specific behavioral responses by simply illuminating animals with blue light. The work paves the way for better understanding of how neurons communicate with each other, and with muscles, to regulate behavior in intact, living organisms. Generally speaking, detailed information about the activity and function of specific neurons during particular behaviors has been difficult to achieve in undissected animals.

Enough anthrax vaccine to inoculate everyone in the United States could be grown inexpensively and safely with only one acre of tobacco plants, a University of Central Florida molecular biologist has found.

A groundbreaking new study examines the origins of holiday giving and finds that our early human ancestors were frequently altruistic.

An international team worked on the verge of the Sahara to gather data on the ground and in the air, to be compared with imagery of the same region acquired by ESA satellites. The results will be used in support of an ambitious project to apply satellite remote sensing to improve monitoring and management of vast water aquifers concealed beneath the desert.

The effects of overfishing may have driven marbled murrelets, an endangered seabird found along the Pacific coast, to increasingly rely upon less nutritious food sources, according to a new study by biologists at the University of California, Berkeley.