A quotidian-type parasite, Plasmodium knowlesi, has been found as a natural infection in man. The infection was acquired by a white male during a short visit to peninsular Malaysia. This occurrence constitutes the first proof that simian malaria is a true zoonosis.
On March 29, 1934, while working at the office of Dr W. Birtwistle, director of fisheries for the Straits Settleents and Federated Malay States, at Singapore, the captain of a coasting vessel came in for information. He had with him the picture and dimensions of a very large fish which he had seen at Labuan a few days before. No one there knew the fish, but I recognized it at once as a fine typical example of Rhineodon typus, the whale shark. The specimen was 25 feet long. [First paragraph: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/81/2097/253]
Increasing energy use, climate change, and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels make switching to low-carbon fuels a high priority. Biofuels are a potential low-carbon energy source, but whether biofuels offer carbon savings depends on how they are produced. Converting rainforests, peatlands, savannas, or grasslands to produce food crop-based biofuels in Brazil, Southeast Asia, and the United States creates a "biofuel carbon debt" by releasing 17 to 420 times more CO2 than the annual greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions that these biofuels would provide by displacing fossil fuels. In contrast, biofuels made from waste biomass or from biomass grown on degraded and abandoned agricultural lands planted with perennials incur little or no carbon debt and can offer immediate and sustained GHG advantages.
Although sled dogs are one of the most specialized groups of dogs, their origin and evolution has received much less attention than many other dog groups. We applied a genomic approach to investigate their spatiotemporal emergence by sequencing the genomes of 10 modern Greenland sled dogs, an ~9500-year-old Siberian dog associated with archaeological evidence for sled technology, and an ~33,000-year-old Siberian wolf. We found noteworthy genetic similarity between the ancient dog and modern sled dogs. We detected gene flow from Pleistocene Siberian wolves, but not modern American wolves, to present-day sled dogs. The results indicate that the major ancestry of modern sled dogs traces back to Siberia, where sled dog-specific haplotypes of genes that potentially relate to Arctic adaptation were established by 9500 years ago.
Anopheles hackeri, a mosquito commonly found breeding in nipa palm leaf bases along the Malayan coast, was demonstrated to be infected with Plasmodium knowlesi by the inoculation of sporozoites into an uninfected rhesus monkey. This was the first demonstration of a natural vector of any monkey malaria.
Scientists are a step closer to unraveling a medical mystery that killed 105 people in Malaysia last year and destroyed the country's pig industry. The Nipah virus, which caused the disease, most likely originated in a native fruit bat species, Malaysian researchers reported here at a meeting last week. They say the findings will help Malaysian health authorities prevent future outbreaks of the Nipah virus. Others see the case as an argument for expanding research into infections that can leap the boundary between animals and humans.