Cancer, the second leading cause of death in the US today, is projected to become the #1 killer worldwide by 2010. As much as one-fifth of all cancers are caused by viruses – some that we encounter every day. If we fail to develop a comprehensive understanding of how these viruses work, we may soon be faced with a cancer pandemic. Human papillomaviruses (HPVs) are a diverse family of DNA viruses that commonly infect the skin and mucosal membranes of humans. This Human Bulletin feature will follow the latest investigations into HPV, dispelling myths about treatment and offering insight into how viral-mediated cancers work.

This Human Bulletin story explores how FMRI, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, is leading to a new understanding of how the human brain is uniquely wired for language acquisition and use.

Most-though not all-anthropologists agree that human culture; imagination and symbolic thought emerged approximately 45,000 years ago. The evidence ranges from fantastic cave paintings and elaborate graves to the first fishing equipment and sturdy huts. When, why and what brought on this burst of modern behavior is the subject of much research. This Human Bulletin will focus on the field research of one of the recently excavated sites in South Africa that lends new evidence to the debate.

Although stem cells hold promise as direct therapy for human diseases, many researchers are even more enthusiastic about the opportunity to use stem cells to study disease fundamentals. Learn how scientists from the New York Stem Cell Foundation, Columbia University’s Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center, and Harvard’s Stem Cell Institute are involving diabetes patients in the search for a cure by developing new stem cell lines from their DNA.

Outbreaks of avian influenza are killing both domestic poultry and wild birds across Asia and Europe. While the virus is lethal to about half of the humans who contract it from birds, a pandemic has yet to occur because this influenza can’t effectively transmit from person to person. Scientists are preparing for that to change. Learn how research teams are sampling migrating waterfowl as well as sequencing the deadly, long-dormant 1918 virus in an effort to stay ahead of the evolving avian flu. A goal of the race is to develop an efficient, effective vaccine for millions of people worldwide.

Our understanding of the universe and the technology used to observe it is constantly evolving. When Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding in 1929 with galaxies becoming increasingly distant from one another, scientists reasoned that the gravitational attraction between galaxies would slow the expansion rate of the universe. But then in 1998 two teams of scientists discovered that the expansion rate of the universe was not in fact slowing down but that it was actually accelerating. This discovery created one of the largest cosmological conundrums of our day, what is causing the universe to accelerate? We'll travel to Lick Observatory and Fermilab where scientists are working to untangle the mystery of cosmic acceleration.

The history of cosmic ray research is a story of scientific adventure. For nearly a century, cosmic ray researchers have climbed mountains, ridden hot air balloons, and traveled to the far corners of the earth in the quest to understand these energetic particles from space. They have solved some scientific mysteries -- and revealed many more. With each passing decade, scientists have discovered higher-energy, and increasingly more rare, cosmic rays. The Pierre Auger Project is the largest scientific enterprise ever conducted in the search for the unknown sources of the highest-energy cosmic rays ever observed.

With its hexagonal mirror array 11 meters across, the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) is the largest single optical telescope in the southern hemisphere. Equipped with a rapid-shutter camera and imaging spectrometer, SALT promises to give us a better understanding of the distribution and dynamics of matter in the Universe.

The MESSENGER orbiter’s January 2008 flyby of the planet Mercury was historic. The last time a spacecraft visited was 1975, and it only mapped half the planet. MESSENGER is now sending back a complete picture of Mercury, shedding light on its geological history. But the ongoing mission will return much more than images. Its data on the planet’s core, magnetic field, composition, and other attributes will help scientists answer pressing questions about the evolution of the terrestrial planets and even the Solar System itself.

Gamma-ray bursts—flashes of intense radiation in space that are often just seconds long—were accidentally discovered in the early 1970’s by satellites built to monitor nuclear bomb explosions. They’ve been one of the leading astrophysical mysteries ever since. This Astro Bulletin introduces you to the scientists and instruments working to unravel the origins of gamma-ray bursts. It highlights Swift, NASA’s burst-detecting satellite, and PAIRITEL, one of a fleet of ground-based telescopes that point toward a gamma-ray burst in response to Swift’s alert to capture the afterglow before it fades. Astrophysicists at Penn State and other institutions are analyzing these afterglows in hopes of determining, finally, what causes the most powerful explosions known.

If technology, cost, and terrain permitted, scientists seeking key data on stars in our galaxy would have loved to construct a behemoth 330 m wide telescope atop Mount Wilson, just northeast of Los Angeles. Instead, they arranged six smaller telescopes over an identical area, synchronizing the light to achieve an equally superlative resolution. Called the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA), the array uses the technique of interferometry to spot details the size of a nickel seen from 16,000 km away. Hear from project astronomers why the labyrinthine engineering required for CHARA’s renowned precision is a small sacrifice for the valuable data it gleans on the properties and life cycles of stars.

Taking a census of all the luminous objects in one-quarter of the visible cosmos is a hefty accounting job: it takes a specially-built telescope on task every clear night for eight years, wielding one of the biggest digital cameras on the planet. Over a hundred million stars, galaxies, and quasars have been tallied so far. Meet the astronomical observers and theorists set on divining the three-dimensional structure and origins of the Universe from these unprecedented scores of data.

Collisions between space objects are a vital part of the evolution of our Solar System. Most of Earth's impact craters have been wiped away due to plate tectonics, but evidence of such cosmic catastrophes, such as Arizona's 50,000-year-old meteor crater, do remain. When is Earth due for another major blast? Meet the professional and amateur astronomers who may be the first to know: first at LINEAR, a near-earth asteroid detection facility in New Mexico, and then at the Smithsonian's Minor Planet Center, where orbits of near-earth objects are tracked for possible hits and misses.

What exactly is gravity, and how fast does it travel? Who was right: Einstein or Newton? This Astro Feature focuses on research at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Livingston, LA, where scientists have constructed a sprawling facility dedicated to the detection of minute changes in space/time caused by gravitational waves coming to us from energetic events in space.

In January 2004, two NASA rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, landed on Mars and began to explore the planet's surface. Their mission: To probe the exotic Martian geology for signs of water past or present. In Geologists on Mars, scientists at NASA explain the goals and challenges of the current Mars mission, and how evidence of water could bolster the possibility that life may once have existed on Mars.

Do Earthlike planets exist outside the Solar System? Astronomers have pondered the question for centuries, but only in recent years have they actually found planets orbiting distant stars. Now, with new "extrasolar" planets being discovered almost daily, scientists are confidently training their telescopes on the biggest mystery of all: Is there life beyond Earth?

Detectable from every direction as a whisper of microwave radiation, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is the oldest, most distant feature of the observable universe. A better understanding of that primal moment promises to reveal a great deal about the true fabric, and ultimate fate, of the universe. Cosmic Microwave Background: The New Cosmology takes viewers to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station where astrophysicists from the University of Chicago's Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica (CARA) are taking advantage of the long cold winters, dry conditions, and ceaseless sky, to make the most detailed measurements yet of the cosmic microwave background.

The Sun continuously sheds its skin, blowing a ferocious wind of charged particles in all directions, including Earth's. From time to time, storms on the Sun's surface—solar flares, coronal mass ejections—toss off added masses of energy and ions. When that turbulence slams into Earth, it produces “space weather,” a natural phenomenon with sometimes spectacular consequences, from colorful auroras to satellite, power and communications failures. Space weather isn't new; the Sun has buffeted Earth with solar particles since the planet first formed. What has changed is society. Space Weather reveals how our increasing use of satellite technology has made us vulnerable to solar storms, and how solar scientists—“space weathermen”—are learning how to predict and forecast the Sun’s activity.

The big picture of how large bodies of soil, water, and air move around the Earth is about to be revealed – as the newest technology meets the oldest physical phenomenon known to humankind. With the GRACE project, NASA has successfully mapped the force of gravity across the 60 million square mile face of the planet, enabling scientists to measure the fallout of climate change in real time.

Fifty-five million years ago a sudden, enormous influx of carbon flooded the ocean and atmosphere for reasons that are still unclear to scientists. What is clear is that as atmospheric CO2 content increased, the average global surface temperature rose 5 to 9°C (9° to 16°F). The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), as this global warming event has become known, lasted about 120,000 years and had dramatic impacts on living things both on land and in the oceans. In this feature, a team of paleontologists, paleobotanists, soil scientists, and other researchers take to the field in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin to seek evidence of ecosystem change during the PETM. The work will help make predictions about how our current global warming event could impact life on Earth.

One paradox of geology is that weathering a mountain down can actually make it rise higher. Scientists have realized this counterintuitive feedback system only in recent decades, and the STEEP team—the St. Elias Erosion and Tectonics Project—is at the forefront of understanding how climate and the movements of Earth's crust interact to build towering peaks. In this feature video, meet STEEP geologists of every stripe collaborating in Alaska’s St. Elias range, one of the most rapidly growing mountain ranges in the world.

The Basin and Range Province is a dramatic landscape covering much of the southwestern United States. Its star attraction is Death Valley, a below-sea-level desert basin flanked by mountain ranges pitching as high as 3.6 kilometers. This feature covers a team of geologists who are combining traditional fieldwork with animated computer modeling to understand how the Basin and Range’s geological drama has played out over the past 36 million years.

The rising temperatures of global climate change are melting the world’s ice. Most notable are the shrinking ice sheets of Greenland and west Antarctica, which have shown dramatic loss in recent years. Travel to the glaciers of Greenland and to fossilized coral reefs of the Florida Keys, where earth scientists are studying geologic records of past warming to predict future ice loss and associated sea level rise.

Three of the most catastrophic volcanic eruptions in geologic history occurred at a place now visited by nearly four million people a year: Yellowstone National Park. The park, which covers parts of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, is set atop three circular volcanic depressions. While these "calderas" are ancient, the magma chamber directly under them continues to shift, heat, and steam the earth above. Science Bulletins talks with the geologists regularly monitoring these disquieting signals to keep tabs on the supervolcano.

The scientific data left in the wake of the horrific December 26, 2004 tsunami is proving invaluable to better prepare for future events. Meet the researchers at the crest of this relatively young science. Featured are the geologists, seismologists, and computer modelers of the U.S. Pacific Northwest, an area replete with geological and anthropological evidence of past tsunamis. Learn how the region is preparing for its inevitable next wave.

Follow scientist-adventurer Lonnie Thompson to the 5,670-meter-high Quelccaya ice cap in Peru’s Southern Andes Mountains. Thompson and his team from Ohio State University are racing to core a cylinder of 2,200-year-old ice to unravel the past climate patterns of this region—before our gradually warming climate melts this invaluable record away. By analyzing global ice cores, glaciologists like Thompson now have a well-preserved record for 150,000 years of climate history, allowing us to better extrapolate toward future climate change.

For centuries, a massive atmospheric system has regularly altered weather patterns, fishery production and animal migrations across the North Atlantic. At last, Earth scientists and climate modelers are beginning to understand how--and when--it happens.

Oxygen gas is key to Earth's biological diversity, but it wasn't always so. Find out how scientists are studying oxygen's origins by tracing its footprints in ancient rocks.

In recent years, scientists have begun using satellite technology to study earthquakes from space. By monitoring the tiniest movements of the Earth's crust, they are zeroing in on the spots where strain is building up and the crust will most likely snap. These efforts could help California residents protect the areas at greatest risk before the next big quake strikes.

On July 4, 1999, a rare and terrifying storm swept through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. What began like a standard-issue thunderstorm soon turned strange and fierce, generating green clouds and strong winds reminiscent of a tornado’s. In fact, the storm was a cousin of the tornado: a derecho (pronounced "de-RAY-cho"), a type of storm so infrequent and fast-moving that only in recent years have meteorologists begun to understand how to recognize and forecast it. Derecho tells the story of this unusual storm and the efforts of scientists to understand it.

If you’re an ocean creature with a hard shell—like a sea urchin, hermit crab, or coral polyp—you prefer ocean water with a pH of about 8.2. This chemistry makes it easy to assemble your armor from carbon-based building blocks dissolved in the ocean. Since the industrial age, though, the ocean’s pH has become more acidic from absorbing the greenhouse gas CO2 from the air, dropping to 8.05 on average. Biologists like Gretchen Hofmann are realizing that this tiny change is hampering the development of hard-shelled marine life, leaving it more vulnerable to environmental stressors. Learn more as Hofmann’s team recreates an acidic ocean in a lab at the University of California–Santa Barbara and tests its influence on sea urchins.

It’s war in many ecosystems around the world as invasive and native species battle for primacy. Facing the increased exchange of ship ballast water among worldwide ports, biologists are grappling with a rate and scale of alien takeovers unprecedented in history. In this Bio Bulletin, see the mussels and crayfish that are stressing the vast freshwater network of the Great Lakes region, and learn what researchers are doing to give native populations a leg up.

Elephants in Thailand have traditionally been captured in the wild and trained to work in the logging industry, but with Thailand’s ban on logging in 1989, elephants and their keepers lost a crucial source of employment and means of survival. While loss of habitat creates an additional challenge to the survival of elephants, one project in northern Thailand experiments with returning elephants to the forest to see whether they can form new family groups and survive on their own in the wild.

In the 1600’s, New York City’s Bronx River was a drinking water source and a sylvan haven for beaver, oysters, and herring. It became blighted as urbanization progressed, reincarnating as an industrial power source, an open sewer, and a garbage dump. Today, landscape ecologists are reconstructing the waterway’s ecological history as a reference point for its restoration effort. Watch conservation teams coax new life into the Bronx River as they restock it with native fish, lay down oyster beds, and remove invasive species along its shores.

On the world's fourth largest island, and virtually nowhere else, lives an entire "infraorder" of primates: the three dozen or so lemur species. But Madagascar has radically transformed since another primate -- humans -- arrived two thousand years ago. Rampant deforestation, habitat fragmentation, and other anthropogenic factors are impacting lemurs much faster than evolution can mitigate the effects. Follow American and Malagasy scientists through the country's remaining forests to learn how these unusual creatures are coping with change.

In 2000, building on its pioneering efforts in establishing Land and Sea Parks, the Commonwealth of The Bahamas initiated one of the world's first networks of marine reserves. This designation provided an international team of researchers with an unprecedented opportunity to study the physical, biological, and socio-economic impacts of such a network, and to integrate all of these aspects into recommendations for future conservation strategies. The project, which is focusing on the Bahamas as a model system, will hopefully be extended to other marine areas in the Caribbean and across the globe.

As urban and suburban sprawl continue to spread across the country, road mortality has been found to be a major factor in the decline of turtle populations throughout the Northeast. In the hopes of informing future development, researchers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst are radio-tracking wood turtles to better quantify their movement patters and habitat needs.

Increasingly, marine researchers are finding that there are far more jellies and jellyfish in the world's oceans than previously believed. Indeed, these creatures may play an unexpectedly large role in ocean ecosystems. This Bio Bulletin video, which features spectacular underwater footage, follows scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute as they retrieve jellies from the deep.

Nominee, "Best Hi-Def Documentary", HDFEST Deffie Awards 2004
In recent years, scientists from around the world have turned to Vietnam in their search for new plant and animal species. Vietnam harbors an astonishing range of habitats, from rain forests and dry forests to mangroves and coral reefs; scientific expeditions and surveys have discovered an amazing range of biodiversity. But even as this biodiversity is being revealed, it is coming under threat from development and human activity. Scientists now are racing to accomplish their studies in an effort to keep Vietnam's biological wealth from disappearing entirely.

Winner, C. David Aguar Award for Excellence in Environmental Cinematography, EcoFocus 2008
Winner, "Best Short Film", The Explorers Club Documentary Film Festival 2005
The Last Wild Horse depicts the emotional reintroduction of Takhi to their last known home range in Mongolia’s Gobi desert. Takhi, also known as Przewalski’s horse, is the last surviving horse species that has never been domesticated. An important national symbol for Mongolians, the Takhi also serves as an important case study for conservation biologists who struggle to support the viability of thousands of species on verge of extinction.

Nominee, "Best Hi-Def Documentary", HDFEST Deffie Awards 2004
There aren’t too many happy stories when it comes to restoring damaged ecosystems, but southern Thailand’s Trang Province is home to one of them, thanks to an innovative grassroots organization called Yad Fon. Founded in 1984, Yad Fon set out to restore the healthy mangrove ecosystems that had sustained these families for thousands of years—and to pull it off by getting the villagers to manage their own natural resources.

Fishermen presume that the damage from overfishing is temporary, but the scientific outlook is far from clear. Before massive overfishing brought many fish populations to the brink of commercial extinction, Georges Bank was one of the richest fishing grounds in the North Atlantic. With several parts of the banks now closed to commercial fishing, the scientists featured in Will the Fish Return? are monitoring the seabed to see how fast it recovers.

The Edwards Dam, which blocked the lower reaches of Maine's Kennebec River for 162 years, was demolished in June 1999. Setting a Maine River Free explores the aftermath, and the efforts of scientists to restore the rich populations of ocean-dwelling fish that once came up river each year to spawn.

As the top predators in the sea, sharks play an important role in the marine food chain. In recent years, however, overfishing has drastically reduced their presence around the world; some shark populations have seen their numbers drop by as much as 80 percent. Man Bites Shark follows researchers from the Mote Marine Laboratory, who set out to study these sentinel creatures and protect them from the most relentless predator of all—humans.

If a species hasn't been seen or collected for a long time, is it extinct. . . or simply scarce? Has it really disappeared, or does it just seem like it, because scientists are looking in the wrong place? Finding the answer isn't easy, and some organisms pose a real challenge. Search for the Fat Catfish, which follows scientists on expedition to a lake high in the Colombian Andes, illustrates the risks and rewards of one quest to prove or disprove the extinction of a poorly understood and highly unusual species.
(Running time: 11 minutes)

"My worry is that the public and politicians may think of this as an easy fix. Why conserve animals in the wild if we can go ahead and clone them in the future and replace them?"
-- Eleanor Sterling, American Museum of Natural History

On January 8, 2001, on the outskirts of Sioux Center, Iowa, the first successful clone of an endangered species was delivered by cesarean section from an ordinary cow named Bessie. Noah, the new-born gaur (a species of wild ox native to India) was created by fusing cryogenically preserved skin cells from a zoo gaur with a cow egg emptied of its DNA. The entire procedure was done without ever coming into contact with a living gaur. Cloning & Conservation asks the important question: Can technology help save endangered species?
(Running time: 9 minutes)