Lions added to endangered species list

In response to the alarming decline of lion populations in the wild, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has listed two lion subspecies as endangered and threatened. Without action to protect them, African lions could see their populations halved by 2035. This week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announced it will list two lion subspecies under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Panthera leo leo – located in India and western and central Africa – will be listed as endangered, while Panthera leo melanochaita – found in eastern and southern Africa – will be listed as threatened. In the last 20 years, lion populations have declined by 43% due to a combination of habitat loss, loss of prey base, trophy hunting, poaching for skins and uses in Chinese traditional medicine, and retaliatory killing of lions by a growing human population. The killing of Cecil the lion in July of this year served to further highlight this issue. Coupled with inadequate financial and other resources for countries to effectively manage protected areas, the impact on lions in the wild has been substantial. Having once been present in south-eastern Europe and throughout much of the Middle East and India, the animals have now lost 85% of their historic range, as shown on the map below. Their numbers could be halved again by 2035, according to a...

Read More........→October 18, 2016

Doctors remove 18 cm tail from Nagpur boy's back

It's the longest recorded so far (Photo: AFP) The doctors operated upon the 18-year-old boy with the 18 cm tail growing from the posterior end of the body on the back. Nagpur: A team of neurosurgeons at the government Super Specialty Hospital (SSH) here have successfully removed a 18-cm long human ‘tail’, apparently the longest recorded so far, from the back of a teenaged boy after its abnormal growth turned painful for him. The doctors operated upon the 18-year-old boy with the 18 cm tail growing from the posterior end of the body on the back. The head of the neurosurgery department and the team, Dr Pramod Giri on Tuesday said though the family knew about this unusual growth, they did not see a doctor due to the social stigma and superstition attached to it. Besides, it was not affecting his health anyway. “Generally, the defect is detected very early as it is present from birth and since it grows with age it cannot remain undetected. But the parents as well as the child hid the fact all these years. The defect can be surgically corrected within few months of birth,” the doctors said. When it became very painful for the boy, his parents brought him to SSH last week and was operated upon two days back. “When the size of the tail grew and a bone developed inside it, the tail began to press on the boy’s back. It was cosmetically...

Read More........→October 12, 2016

Japanese cell biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi wins Nobel Prize in Physiology

Stockholm: Yoshinori Ohsumi, a Japanese cell biologist specialising in autophagy and a professor in Tokyo Institute of Technology's Frontier Research Centre, was on Monday awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries of the mechanism for autophagy, a process that deals with destruction of cells in the body. The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet decided to award the prize to Ohsumi, 71, as his discoveries led to a new paradigm in the "understanding of how the cell recycles its content". "His discoveries opened the path to understanding the fundamental importance of autophagy in many physiological processes, such as in the adaptation to starvation or response to infection," astatement on the official website of the Nobel Prize said. Because of Japan's 23rd Nobel Laureate Ohsumi's works, it is now known that autophagy -- self eating -- controls important physiological functions where cellular components need to be degraded and recycled. The concept emerged during the 1960s, when researchers first observed that the cell could destroy its own contents by enclosing it in membranes, forming sack-like vesicles that were transported to a recycling compartment, called the lysosome, for degradation. Ohsumi reasoned that if he could disrupt the degradation process in the vacuole while the process of autophagy...

Read More........→October 04, 2016