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A fifth of world's plant species at risk of extinctionThe Irish Times - Thursday, September 30, 2010 LONDON – ONE in five of the world’s 380,000 plant species is threatened with extinction and human activity is doing most of the damage, according to a global study published yesterday. Scientists from Britain’s Botanic Gardens at Kew, London’s Natural History Museum and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), found that more than 22 per cent of species were endangered, critically endangered or vulnerable. “The single greatest threat is conversion of natural habitats to agricultural use, directly impacting 33 per...

Viewed from a distance, the natural world often presents a vista of sublime, majestic placidity. Yet beneath the foliage and hidden from the distant eye, a vast, unceasing slaughter rages. Wherever there is animal life, predators are stalking, chasing, capturing, killing, and devouring their prey. Agonized suffering and violent death are ubiquitous and continuous. This hidden carnage provided one ground for the philosophical pessimism of Schopenhauer, who contended that “one simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal...

Mass extinctions have served as huge reset buttons that dramatically changed the diversity of species found in oceans all over the world, according to a comprehensive study of fossil records. The findings suggest humans will live in a very different future if they drive animals to extinction, because the loss of each species can alter entire ecosystems. Some scientists have speculated that effects of humans - from hunting to climate change - are fueling another great mass extinction. A few go so far as to say we are entering a new geologic epoch, leaving the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch behind and...

5 Distasteful Bets You Can Make On The Gulf Oil Spill Gus Lubin Jun. 11, 2010, 9:27 AM There's markets and wagers for everything, including all your burning questions about the Gulf Oil Spill (via The Barrel). Paddypower.com offers bets on the next CEO of BP: Ian Conn -- 3/1 Sir John Brown -- 7/2 Robert Dudley -- 7/2 ... and Tony Blair -- 100/1 First to become extinct: Kemp's Ridley Turtle (pictured) -- 4/5 Bluefin Tuna -- 6/4 Brown Pelican -- 8/1 BP share prices at year end (LSE): 360p - 420p -- 9/4 420p - 500p -- 10/3...

Jun 2010 - The Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, the largest extinction in history, could have been caused by huge, worldwide methane explosions, says Dr. Gregory Ryskin, Professor of Chemical Engineering at Northwestern University Could such explosions have created the Carolina Bays? (More than two million huge holes were gouged into the ground about 12,000 years ago at the Gothenburg magnetic reversal. Some of the holes - which are still there - are bigger than nearby cities. Those holes are now collectively known as the Carolina Bays.) During the Great Permian Extinction, when up to 95% of all species went extinct, Dr....

The worst-case scenario of the consequences of global warming - mass extinctions - appears to be a reality for lizards, according to a new report in Science. The authors found that 12 percent of local populations of lizards have already disappeared from hundreds of sites in Mexico. Furthermore, within the next 70 years, the authors predict that 1 in 5 lizard species will no longer exist anywhere on the planet, all the result of rising global temperatures. Although a growing amount of data is showing the impact of climate change on species, these lizard extinctions were somewhat surprising, said Jack...

The Anglican Church in Canada – once as powerful in the nation's secular life as it was in its soul – may be only a generation away from extinction, says a just-published assessment of the church's future. The report, prepared for the Anglican Diocese of British Columbia, calls Canada a post-Christian society in which Anglicanism is declining faster than any other denomination. It says the church has been “moved to the far margins of public life.” According to the report, the diocese – “like most across Canada” – is in crisis. The report repeats, without qualification or question, the results...

Researchers believe they have identified the source of fatal tumours that threaten to wipe out the wild population of Tasmanian devils. Writing in Science, an international team of scientists suggest cells that protect nerves are the likely origin of devil facial tumour disease (DFTD). The disease is a transmissible cancer that is spread by physical contact, and quickly kills the animals. DFTD has caused the devil population to collapse by 60% in the past decade. "To look more closely at the tumours' origin, we sequenced the genes that are expressed in this devil cancer and compared them with other genes...

But, for the fourth year running, the cold came early. First their animals and now their children are dying.....in ...... escalating numbers.....

The Tasmanian devil, the spaniel-size marsupial found on the Australian island of Tasmania, has been hurtling toward extinction in recent years, the victim of a bizarre and mysterious facial cancer that spreads like a plague. Now Australian scientists say they have discovered how the cancer originated. The finding, being reported Friday in the journal Science, sheds light on how cancer cells can sometimes liberate themselves from the hosts where they first emerged. On a more practical level, it also opens the door to devising vaccines that could save the Tasmanian devils. “It’s a great paper,” said Katherine Belov, a geneticist...

Climate change threatens the survival of dozens of animal species from the emperor penguin to koalas, according to a report released Monday at the UN climate summit. Rising sea levels, ocean acidification and shrinking polar ice are taking a heavy toll on species already struggling to cope with pollution and shrinking habitats, said the study from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), an intergovernmental group. "Humans are not the only ones whose fate is at stake here in Copenhagen -- some of our favourite species are also taking the fall for our CO2 emissions," said Wendy Foden,...

Researchers from Imperial College London believe that when species become asexual they could be on their way to extinction... P. marneffei is a fungus which causes disease in people with damaged immune systems, such as HIV/AIDS patients, and it is only found in parts of south-east Asia... Dr Bill Hanage, one of the paper's authors, from Imperial College London, adds: "By being asexual, P. marneffei is not only limiting its ability to adapt, it may be at risk of becoming extinct. If it is unable to adapt to new environments, it will be unable to adapt to changes in its...

Pandas face a difficult future, despite great efforts to preserve them. With their dwindling population, shrinking habitat, and weakening genetic strength, one evolutionist has suggested that these longstanding symbols of the World Wildlife Federation (WWF) should be allowed to die out...

Stephen Hawking believes that one of the major factors in the possible scarcity of intelligent life in our galaxy is the high probability of an asteroid or comet colliding with inhabited planets. We have observed, Hawking points out in Life in the Universe, the collision of a comet, Schumacher-Levi, with Jupiter (below), which produced a series of enormous fireballs, plumes many thousands of kilometers high, hot "bubbles" of gas in the atmosphere, and large dark "scars" on the atmosphere which had lifetimes on the order of weeks. It is thought the collision of a rather smaller body with the Earth,...

Comet strikes are an unlikely cause of past mass extinctions on Earth, according to computer simulations. Scientists used the simulations to model the paths of long-period comets, to determine the likelihood of these "dirty snowballs" striking our planet. The University of Washington, Seattle, research appears in Science journal. How many mass extinctions in Earth's history were caused by these icy bodies crashing into our planet has been a subject of considerable debate. Many scientists agree that an asteroid strike 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs. But there is uncertainty about how many other such events were triggered by...

"These findings are inconsistent with the alternative and already hotly debated theory that overhunting by Clovis people led to the rapid extinction of large mammals at the end of the ice age, the research team argues in the PNAS paper."

NY- The Internet is by far the most popular source of information and the preferred choice for news ahead of television, newspapers and radio, according to a new poll in the U.S. But just a small fraction of U.S. adults considered social Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace as a good source of news and even fewer would opt for Twitter. More than half of the people questioned in the Zogby Interactive survey said they would select the Internet if they had to choose only one source of news, followed by 21% for television and 10% for both newspapers...

News to Note, May 2, 2009A weekly feature examining news from the biblical viewpoint (Read the following stories, and much more by clicking excerpt link at the bottom) 1. LiveScience: “Swine Flu Is Evolution in Action”Swine flu—both the virus itself and the associated paranoia—seems to be sweeping the world. Is it evolution in action? 2. LiveScience: “Some Dinosaurs Survived the Asteroid Impact”The widely taught model of dinosaur extinction doesn’t line up with the latest fossil findings. 3. National Geographic News: “Baby Mammoth CT Scan Reveals Internal Organs”The preserved baby woolly mammoth shows that it died in an “oxygen-deprived environment” that...

A brilliant burst of gamma rays may have caused a mass extinction event on Earth 440 million years ago—and a similar celestial catastrophe could happen again, according to a new study. Most gamma-ray bursts are thought to be streams of high-energy radiation produced when the core of a very massive star collapses. Such a disaster may have been responsible for the mass die-off of 70 percent of the marine creatures that thrived during the Ordovician period (488 to 443 million years ago), suggests study leader Brian Thomas, an astrophysicist at Washburn University in Kansas. The simulation also shows that a...

March 9, 2009 — The Permian extinction – one of the most dramatic events in the history of life on Earth, in which some 90% of species went extinct...is now being interpreted as a “nonevent” by four geologists. ... Robert Gastaldo and two geology colleagues from Colby College in Maine, and geologist Johann Neveling from Pretoria, studied the Permian-Triassic boundary in the Karoo Basin of South Africa and published a paper in Geology this month,1 titled, “The terrestrial Permian-Triassic boundary event bed is a nonevent.” ... Well, isn’t this an upset.  How much lag time will it take to change...