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• WCS study confirms that endangered musk deer still live in Nuristan Province – some 60 years after last sighting
• Species targeted by poachers: Musk deer scent glands are more valuable than gold
• Study appears in the October issue of the journal Oryx

The imbalanced structure of Twitter, where some users have many followers and the large majority barely has several dozen followers, means that messages from the more influential have much more impact. Less popular users can compensate for this by increasing their activity and their tweets, but the outcome is costly and inefficient. This was confirmed by an analysis of the social network performed by researchers from the Technical University of Madrid.

Melbourne researchers have uncovered key steps involved in programmed cell death, offering new targets for the treatment of diseases including lupus, cancers and neurodegenerative diseases.

A University of Adelaide-led project has developed a new test that can distinguish between birds that have been vaccinated against the H5N1 strain of avian influenza virus or "bird flu" with those that have been naturally infected.

This is a significant step in the fight against this often fatal strain of avian influenza which is widespread in the poultry populations of South East Asia, particularly Indonesia and Vietnam.

As potential next-generation therapeutics and research tools, few life sciences technologies hold more promise than genome-editing proteins – molecules that can be programmed to alter specific genes in order to treat or even cure genetic diseases.

There's at least one catch though – getting genome-editing proteins into cells, where they need to be to access the genome, is a major challenge, especially in live animals or human patients.

In March 2013, Cyprus agreed to a €17 billion (£13.42 billion) international bailout by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission (EC).

The magnitude of the bailout was 100 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and also involved a bank bail in. This is when the borrower's creditors are forced to bear some of the burden by having a portion of their debt written off in order for the bank to have sustainable level of debt.

Connectivity cost calculations for conservation corridorsWhere are conservation dollars best invested to connect fragmented habitats? Sara Torrubia and colleagues test their model balancing restoration costs with connection quality on the threatened Washington ground squirrel in eastern Washington State.

"Getting the most connectivity per conservation dollar," by Sara Torrubia, Brad H McRae, Joshua J Lawler, Sonia A Hall, Meghan Halabisky, Jesse Langdon, and Michael Case.

Agricultural companions: co-planting partner crops improves yields

This news release is available in French.

TAMPA, Fla. (Oct. 30, 2014) – The scientific community has made significant strides in recent years in identifying important genetic contributors to malignancy and developing therapeutic agents that target altered genes and proteins. A recent approach to treat cancer called synthetic lethality takes advantage of genetic alterations in cancer cells that make them more susceptible to certain drugs. Alan F. List, MD, president and CEO of Moffitt Cancer Center, co-authored an article on synthetic lethality featured in the October 30 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The NHS should follow the lead of aviation and other safety-critical industries and establish an independent safety investigation agency, according to a paper published today by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. The authors say the NHS has no consistent approach to investigating safety issues, and remains dependent on costly one-off independent or public enquiries to learn from the most serious failures, such as those contributing to the tragedies at Mid Staffordshire.

Researchers from the UK have called into question a theory suggesting that a previously reported risk of leukaemia among children born close to overhead power lines could be caused by an alteration to surrounding air pollution.

Highlights

A UAlberta team has discovered that a protein that plays a critical role in metabolism, the process by which the cell generates energy from foods, is important for the development of pulmonary hypertension, a deadly disease.

Pulmonary hypertension is caused by the narrowing of the blood vessels in the lung, due to excessive growth of cells in the blood vessel wall. The cells grow in number until they obstruct the vessels, causing the heart to struggle pushing blood through the lungs to the point where the heart fails and the patient dies.

The impact vitamin A has on newborns is virtually unknown, but Penn State nutrition researchers have published two papers that may provide a framework for future investigations of the vitamin and neonatal health.

After supplementing newborn rats with vitamin A, the researchers found that vitamin A distribution within the body increases suddenly but temporarily, with a significant amount found in tissues other than the liver. Vitamin A in adults is usually found in significant amounts in the liver.

Overwhelmed by speculators trying to cash-in on a prized medicinal fungus known as Himalayan Viagra, two isolated Tibetan communities have managed to do at the local level what world leaders often fail to do on a global scale — implement a successful system for the sustainable harvest of a precious natural resource, suggests new research from Washington University in St. Louis.