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/ 5 February 2004
Collectively, the householders of the world could be about to put the cat out. Lion numbers have dropped by 90% in 20 years. The other big cats are going fast. How long before all the Earth’s mega species disappear from the wild, and is there anything we can do about it?
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/ 3 September 2003
Colin Humphreys of Cambridge University has the 21st-century equivalent of the philosopher’s stone. He is working with something that sounds like an alchemist’s dream: a substance that could turn base metal into gold. It could transmit light without wasting energy as heat and make computers 10 000 times faster.
The latest mammalian baby clone is a pretty Halflinger foal called Prometea, born to an Italian research institution on May 28. It took more than 800 embryos and nine would-be surrogate mother mares to arrive at just one foal, which may or may not lead a normal life: it will take a couple of decades to discover the answer to that.
A common mutation in a single gene could make the difference between fighting back against life’s assaults and sinking into clinical depression, according to recent research.
After a six-year search Japanese scientists are preparing to clone prehistoric woolly mammoths from frozen DNA samples found in Siberia.
Groundwater, the source of life for two billion people, is diminishing almost everywhere in the world, says a recent study by the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep).
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/ 22 February 2003
Abduction by imaginary aliens can be almost as traumatic as being caught up in real horror, according to United States psychologists
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/ 31 January 2003
The four-year droughts that scorched harvests in Afghanistan, seared the Mediterranean scrub and baked cornfields in the American south-east may have had a common cause, according to US researchers.
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/ 14 January 2003
Some time in the next two weeks, European scientists hope to launch a spaceship the size of a delivery van and lob it across more than 4-billion miles of space to rendezvous 10 years from now with a dark lump of rock and ice the size of a city block.