A lifelong obsession with fossils led to Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council grantee Robert Reisz discovering the oldest known dinosaur embryos and the oldest known reptile that stands on two legs.

Fungi-infected plants often cause dramatic symptoms such as the formation of colourful masses of fungal spores instead of seeds. Some fungi can even make infected plants smell like rotting fish. In general, these infections cause major headaches for farmers who are counting on their crops, such as wheat and barley, to survive through the growing season.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine have derived uniparental embryonic stem cells - created from a single donor's eggs or two sperm - and, for the first time, successfully used them to repopulate a damaged organ with healthy cells in adult mice. Their findings demonstrate that single-parent stem cells can proliferate normally in an adult organ and could provide a less controversial alternative to the therapeutic cloning of embryonic stem cells.

Modern human mothers are probably happy that they typically have one, maybe two babies at a time, but for early hominids, low birth numbers combined with competition often spelled extinction.