The National Zoo welcomed a new kiwi chick on March 7, 2008. The chick, whose sex has yet to be determined by DNA testing, is the third chick to ever hatch at the National Zoo. The first hatching occurred in 1975 and was the first to occur outside of New Zealand. Kiwis are endangered and are extremely rare to see in captivity -- only four zoos outside of New Zealand have successfully bred kiwis, and only three US zoos exhibit them, including the National Zoo which has exhibited kiwis since 1967. Credit: Jessie Cohen, Smithsonian's National Zoo Early Friday morning, March 7, one of the world’s most endangered species—a North Island brown kiwi—hatched at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo Bird House. Keepers had been incubating the egg for five weeks, following a month long incubation by the chick’s father, carefully monitoring it for signs of pipping: the process in which the chick starts to break through the shell. The chick remained in an isolet for four days and is now in a specially designed brooding box.

Tiny organisms play a powerful role in removing nitrate, a form of nitrogen pollution caused by human activity, in streams, according to a study by a team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and published in Nature.

Researchers have developed a new, lean mouse with characteristics suggesting that someday, using medication to manipulate a specific protein in humans could emerge as a strategy to treat obesity and disorders associated with excess weight, such as diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

The body’s first line of defence against pathogenic bacteria that we ingest may not be the immune system but rather the cells that line the intestine. This surprising conclusion is just one facet of a study by Dr. Maya Saleh, a researcher at the Research institute of the McGill University Health Centre that will be published in the journal Cell Host & Microbe on March 12.

A WHEAT disease that could destroy most of the world’s main wheat crops could strike south Asia’s vast wheat fields two years earlier than research had suggested, leaving millions to starve. The fungus, called Ug99, has spread from Africa to Iran, and may already be in Pakistan. If so, this is extremely bad news, as Pakistan is not only critically reliant on its wheat crop, it is also the gateway to the Asian breadbasket, including the vital Punjab region.

Cocaine addicts often suffer a downward emotional spiral that is a key to their craving and chronic relapse. While researchers have developed animal models of the reward of cocaine, they have not been able to model this emotional impact, until now.

A gene therapy treatment that restores a missing liver enzyme in test animals could provide a cure for a rare metabolic disorder in humans, according to Duke University Medical Center researchers.

Researchers from EPFL and Caltech have made an important neurobiological discovery of how humans learn to predict risk. The research, appearing in the March 12 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, will shed light on why certain kinds of risk, notably financial risk, are often underestimated, and whether abnormal behavior such as addiction (e.g. to gambling or drugs) could be caused by an erroneous evaluation of risk.

A protein signaling pathway recently discovered to guide the formation of the skeleton in the fetus also keeps bones strong through adult life, according to two papers published recently in the journal Nature Medicine. Furthermore, the same mechanism may be at the heart of osteoporosis, where too little bone is made over time, and bone cancer, where uncontrolled bone growth contributes to tumors. Lastly, the results argue that an experimental Alzheimer’s drug may also be useful against bone cancer.

The machinery responsible for energy production in fat cells is working poorly as a result of obesity. Finnish research done at the University of Helsinki and the National Public Health Institute shows that this may aggravate and work to maintain the obese state in humans.

Bipolar Disorder (BPD or manic-depressive illness) is one of the most serious of all mental disorders, affecting millions of individuals worldwide. Affected individuals alternate between states of deep depression and mania. While depression is characterized by persistent and long-term sadness or despair, mania is a mental state characterized by great excitement, flight of ideas, a decreased need for sleep, and, sometimes, uncontrollable behavior, hallucinations, or delusions. BPD likely arises from the complex interaction of multiple genes and environmental factors. Unlike some brain diseases, no single gene has been implicated in BPD.