Primary succession following a receding glacier in Alaska. Whenever an event such as a fire, clear cut, or lava flow creates an empty habitat, species arrive, interact, and assemble to form a new ecological community—a process known as "succession." How quickly does succession proceed" Most ecologists might expect change to be rapid at first and then decline as the community ages, but there was no systematic analysis of this idea until recently.

In the steamy tropics, even the birds find the pace of life a bit more relaxed, research shows.

The Honourable Maxime Bernier, Minister of Industry, and Mr. Raymond Bachand, Quebec Minister of Economic Development, Innovation and Export, and Minister of Tourism, along with Dr. Martin Godbout, President and CEO of Genome Canada, Mr. Paul L'Archevêque, President and CEO of Génome Québec, and Mr. Luc Vinet, Rector of the Université de Montréal, today announced $34.5 million in funding for the International Consortium known as the Public Population Project in Genomics (P3G), which includes the Quebec-based CARTaGENE project. Counting all the contributions from international partners, the total budget of the initiative could reach $64.5 million.

The steady formation of new brain cells in adults may represent more than merely a patching up of aging brains, a new study has shown. The new adult brain cells may serve to give the adult brain the same kind of learning ability that young brains have while still allowing the existing, mature circuitry to maintain stability.

Fragile X syndrome is the most common form of inherited mental retardation, occurring in 1 in 3600 males and 1 in 4000 to 6000 females.

If you go fishing for Arctic char you may end up catching distinctly different-looking individuals although they were all caught in the same lake. Similarly, whitefish, threespine stickleback, and some sunfishes also display quite discrete groups living in the same lakes but utilizing different food resources in order to survive. The phenomenon is called resource polymorphism and has been observed and documented as early as in the 18th century, but has continued to receive a lot of scientific interest since it gives us a chance to study ongoing evolution. However, not all species display resource polymorphism, and naturally, in order to gain deeper understanding of evolutionary facilitators, the question arises: Why do some species display resource polymorphism, whereas other don't?

Circadian clocks regulate the timing of biological functions in almost all higher organisms. Anyone who has flown through several time zones knows the jet lag that can result when this timing is disrupted.

Could the food we eat be contributing to the continuing rise of antibiotic-resistant infections? Harmless and even beneficial bacteria that exist in our food supply may also be carrying genes that code for antibiotic resistance. Once in our bodies, could they transmit the resistance genes to disease-causing bacteria?

Nature, through the trial and error of evolution, has discovered a vast diversity of life from what can only presumed to have been a primordial pool of building blocks. Inspired by this success, a new Biodesign Institute research team, led by John Chaput, is now trying to mimic the process of Darwinian evolution in the laboratory by evolving new proteins from scratch. Using new tricks of molecular biology, Chaput and co-workers have evolved several new proteins in a fraction of the 3 billion years it took nature.

First in a petri dish and now on live salamanders, probiotic bacteria seem to repel a deadly fungus being blamed for worldwide amphibian deaths and even extinctions. Though the research is in its early stages, scientists are encouraged by results that could lead the way to helping threatened species like mountain yellow-legged frogs of the Sierra Nevada mountains of southern California.

Scientists have made a breakthrough in understanding how cancers spread in what could lead to new ways of beating the disease.

As the Earth’s temperatures continue to rise, we can expect a signficant change in infectious disease patterns around the globe. Just exactly what those changes will be remains unclear, but scientists agree they will not be for the good.