Mark D. Zabel wants to set some fires.

Dr. Zabel and his colleagues are developing plans to burn plots of National Park Service land in Arkansas and Colorado. If the experiments turn out as the researchers hope, they will spare some elk and deer a gruesome death.

Across a growing swath of North America, these animals are dying from a mysterious disorder called chronic wasting disease. It’s caused not by a virus or bacterium, but a deformed protein called a prion.

Continue reading “Fire May Be the Only Remedy for a Plague Killing Deer and Elk” →

A common genetic mutation is linked to an increase in life span of about 10 years among men, researchers reported on Friday.

The mutation, described in the journal Science Advances, did not seem to have any effect on women. Still, it joins a short list of gene variants shown to influence human longevity.

By studying these genes, scientists may be able to design drugs to mimic their effects and slow aging. But the search for them has been slow and hard.

Continue reading “Scientists Discover a Key to a Longer Life in Male DNA” →

Fossils discovered in Morocco are the oldest known remains of Homo sapiens, scientists reported on Wednesday, a finding that rewrites the story of mankind’s origins and suggests that our species evolved in multiple locations across the African continent.

“We did not evolve from a single ‘cradle of mankind’ somewhere in East Africa,” said Philipp Gunz, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and a co-author of two new studies on the fossils, published in the journal Nature. “We evolved on the African continent.”

Continue reading “Oldest Fossils of Homo Sapiens Found in Morocco, Altering History of Our Species” →