Dr Pep Canadell, from the Global Carbon Project and CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, says today in the journal Science that tropical deforestation releases 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon each year into the atmosphere.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago explain in the May 11 issue of Circulation Research how an enzyme acts on the heart's pacemaker to slow the rapid beating of the heart's "fight-or-flight" reaction to adrenaline.

In a new study published online in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens, Dr. Vincent J. Munster, of Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, and colleagues identify new host species for avian influenza A virus (H5N1) and provide important information on the distinctions between the ecology and epidemiology of various global strains of the virus.

Pigs carry hepatitis E virus (HEV), which they can pass on to humans. But now research from Japan published in Online Open Access journal BMC Veterinary Research says that pigs get HEV early enough to minimise the risk of human infection. The scenario humans need to worry about would occur if the infection rate in pigs drops. At low infection rates, there is actually a higher chance pigs will pass on HEV to humans at slaughter.

Magnetic switches like those in computers also might be used to manipulate individual strands of DNA for high-speed applications such as gene sequencing, experiments at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) suggest.

Graphic showing a lipid bilayer membrane (blue) with an alpha-hemolysin nanopore. A polyethylene glycol molecule (green globular structure) is transiting the pore; others are in solution on one side of the membrane. The colored spheres represent individual atoms, and are approximately 0.5 nanometers in diameter, or one twenty-thousandth the width of a human hair. Credit: NIST Imagine being able to rapidly identify tiny biological molecules such as DNA and toxins using less than a drop of salt water in a system that can fit on a microchip. It's closer than you might believe, say a team of researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Brazil's Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, and Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

Pretreatment with double-dose anticlotting medication just before percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) cuts the combined risk of heart attack and cardiac death by half, according to a study reported at the 30th Annual Scientific Sessions of the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions (SCAI), May 9–12, 2007, in Orlando, FL.