Conserving Australia's most endangered snake might mean lighting more bush fires, ecologists have proposed.

Until now, Triceratops was thought to be unusual among its ceratopsid relatives. While many ceratopsids—a common group of herbivorous dinosaurs that lived toward the end of the Cretaceous—have been found in enormous bonebed deposits of multiple individuals, all known Triceratops (over 50 in total) fossils have been solitary individuals. But a new discovery of a jumble of at least three juveniles the badlands of the north-central United States suggests that the three-horned dinosaurs were not only social animals, but may have exhibited unique gregarious groupings of juveniles.

Deep-sea corals from about 400 meters off the coast of the Hawaiian Islands are much older than once believed and some may be the oldest living marine organisms known to man.

A blind fish that has evolved a unique technique for sensing motion may inspire a new generation of sensors that perform better than current active sonar.

Many Australians probably think tuberculosis (TB) is a disease of the past. They are wrong.

A buildup of chemical bonds on certain cancer-promoting genes, a process known as hypermethylation, is widely known to render cells cancerous by disrupting biological brakes on runaway growth. Now, Johns Hopkins scientists say the reverse process — demethylation — which wipes off those chemical bonds may also trigger more than half of all cancers.

Ice storms and other severe weather can have devastating impacts on agricultural crops, including perennial tree crops. Major ice storms occur at least once a decade, with truly catastrophic "icing events" recorded once or twice a century within a broad belt extending from eastern Texas through New England. Ice storms can result in overwhelming losses to orchards and expensive cleanup for producers.

The origin of the neurotoxin azaspiracid has finally been identified after a search for more than a decade. The azaspiracid toxin group can cause severe poisoning in human consumers of mussels after being enriched in the shellfish tissues. The scientific periodical European Journal of Phycology reports in its current issue (Vol. 44/1: p. 63-79) that a tiny algal species, the dinoflagellate Azadinium spinosum, is responsible. Researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association have isolated and described the hitherto unknown organism as a new genus and species of dinoflagellate. They successfully isolated the organism and multiplied it in pure laboratory cultures, subsequently identifying it as the producer of azaspiracid toxin.

Photosynthesis produces the food that we eat and the oxygen that we breathe ― could it also help satisfy our future energy needs by producing clean-burning hydrogen? Researchers studying a hydrogen-producing, single-celled green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, have unmasked a previously unknown fermentation pathway that may open up possibilities for increasing hydrogen production.