Throughout history, human beings have used the whistle for everything from hailing a cab to carrying a tune. Now, an orangutan's spontaneous whistling is providing scientists at Great Ape Trust of Iowa new insights into the evolution of speech and learning.

Climate change can have significant impacts on high-elevation lakes and imperiled Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged frogs that depend upon them, according to U.S. Forest Service and University of California, Berkeley, scientists.

Scientists at the University of Michigan have shown that gene therapy can be used to successfully stop the development of periodontal disease, the leading cause of tooth loss in adults.

More than five million people die every year from infectious diseases, despite the availability of numerous antibiotics and vaccines. The discovery of penicillin to treat bacterial infections, along with the development of vaccines for previously incurable virus diseases such as polio and smallpox, achieved great reductions in mortality during the mid-20th century.

A Newcastle University study involving thousands of families is helping prospective parents work out whether they are likely to have sons or daughters.

In the art world, the most successful portraits are often those that reveal the true essence of the subject – a subject that on canvas, at least, will never age. In the science world, researchers are relying on portraits of gene expression patterns – but, in this case, the images are helping to reveal how various tissues form.

Research conducted at The University of Queensland could contribute to the development of a vaccine and cure for West Nile virus and Dengue fever.

Research conducted by a team in Switzerland suggests that a family of genes involved in regulating the expression of other genes in the brain is responsible for helping us deal with external inputs such as stress. Their results, appearing in the December 11 advance online version of the journal Neuron, may also give a clue to why some people are more susceptible to anxiety or depression than others.

A group of five endemic and recently extinct Hawaiian songbird species were historically classified as "honeyeaters" due to striking similarities to birds of the same name in Australia and neighboring islands in the South Pacific. Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution, however, have recently discovered that the Hawaiian birds, commonly known as the oo's and the kioea, share no close relationship with the other honeyeaters and in fact represent a new and distinct family of birds—unfortunately, all of the species in the new family are extinct, with the last species of the group disappearing about 20 years ago.

Biologists have known for decades that cells use tiny molecular motors to move chromosomes, mitochondria, and many other organelles within the cell, but no one has been able to understand what "steers" these engines to their destinations. Now, researchers at the University of Rochester have shed new light on how cells accomplish this feat, and the results may eventually lead to new approaches to fighting pathogens and neurological diseases.

Elephants in Zakouma National Park, the last stronghold for the savanna elephants of Central Africa's Sahel region, now hover at about 1,000 animals, down from an estimated 3,000 in 2006. Ivory poachers using automatic weapons have decimated elephant populations – particularly when herds venture seasonally outside of the park.

The human immune system is in a perpetual state of self-experimentation. It expertly mutates and shuffles the DNA of its own cells to evolve new defenses against the vast array of microbes that try to invade our bodies. But when the genetic experiment goes awry, the result can be a deadly cancer.

HIV is so deadly largely because it evolves so rapidly. With a single virus as the origin of an infection, most patients will quickly come to harbor thousands of different versions of HIV, all a little bit different and all competing with one another to most efficiently infect that person's cells. Its rapid and unique evolution in every patient is what allows HIV to evade the body's defenses and gives the virus great skill at developing resistance to a pantheon of antiviral drugs.