Missing monkey mischief in Mississippi

A lock-pickin' primate described by handlers as "a smart little monkey" busted from his pen and escaped the Tupelo Buffalo Park and Zoo early Tuesday.

Oliver apparently picked the lock to his pen about 8 a.m. and led park staff on a wild chase through their trail system before eventually escaping.

This is actually Oliver's second leg on the lam. About six years ago, the frisky primate fled the home of Buffalo Park owner Dan Franklin and roamed the Tupelo Country Club grounds for roughly two weeks.

Police and animal-control officers are on the look-out for Oliver, but park staffers also seek help from residents to steer home the wayward monkey. Do not try to touch him, though, he will bite.

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Bleating back the weeds

Across the dry grasslands of California's valleys and foothills, goats are gaining recognition as an effective weapon to cut the risk of rampaging wildfires and to check the spread of nonnative weeds such as star thistle.

Goats don't have the drawbacks of chemical sprays, and they have a sweet tooth for weeds and other noxious plants that other grazing animals shun, say boosters of the practice.

Between bouts of jumping into the air and butting heads, the young goats swarm through the weeds, grazing on dry grass, chewing the bark of manzanita trees and reaching high on two legs to munch on the leaves of taller trees.

The 49 adult goats and 30 youngsters belong to Dave Cheney, who has operated Pine Ridge Goats since 2001.

Cheney trucks the animals into an area to be cleared, sets up a temporary electric fence, arms it with a truck battery and puts the goats to work on the weeds.

His goats are Kikos, a hardy breed developed in New Zealand. Beyond what they eat on their own, they get a dessert of farm-grown hay at the end of the day, when he uses it to entice the goats into their pens.

Zebrafish study may point way to blindness cure

....Tropical fish have been studied for various reasons, many of which are to explain why they behave the way they do. This study may lead to health benefits for humans....

LONDON (Reuters) - The ability of zebrafish to regenerate damaged retinas has given scientists a clue about restoring human vision and could lead to an experimental treatment for blindness within five years.

British researchers said on Wednesday they had successfully grown in the laboratory a type of adult stem cell found in the eyes of both fish and mammals that develops into neurons in the retina.

In future, these cells could be injected into the eye as a treatment for diseases such as macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetes-related blindness, according to Astrid Limb of University College London's (UCL) Institute of Ophthalmology.

Damage to the retina -- the part of the eye that sends messages to the brain -- is responsible for most cases of sight loss.

"Our findings have enormous potential," Limb said. "It could help in all diseases where the neurons are damaged, which is basically nearly every disease of the eye."

Limb and her colleagues studied so-called Mueller glial cells in the eyes of people aged from 18 months to 91 years and found they were able to develop them into all types of neurons found in the retina.

They were also able to grow them easily in the lab, they reported in the journal Stem Cells.

The cells have already been tested in rats with diseased retinas, where they successfully migrated into the retina and took on the characteristics of the surrounding neurons. Now the team is working on the same approach in humans.

"We very much hope that we could do autologous transplants within five years," Limb told Reuters.

Autologous transplants, initially on a trial basis, will involve manipulating cells and injecting them back into an individual's own eye. Eventually, Limb hopes it will also be possible to transfer the cells between different people.

"Because they are so easy to grow, we could make stem cell banks and have cell lines available to the general population, subject to typing as with blood transfusions," she said.

Just why zebrafish have an abundant supply of adult stem cells to regenerate their retinas, while they are rare in mammals, remains a mystery but Limb suspects it is because mammals have a limiting system to stop proliferation.

The new work on Mueller glial cells is the latest example of researchers exploring the potential of different kinds of stem cells in treating eye disease. Another team from UCL and Moorfield's Eye Hospital said in June they aimed to repair damaged retinas with cells derived from embryonic stem cells.

Eating foie gras may increase risk of Alzheimer’s

The popular delicacy foie gras (which is French for “fat liver”) is produced in a way that animal rights activists insist is barbaric. Ducks and geese are force-fed corn mash twice a day, through a tube that is inserted into the oesophagus. The birds are slaughtered 2-3 weeks later, and their engorged livers are then removed, to be sold whole or for use in making pâté, mousse or parfait.

But it seems that the slaughtered birds may be the ones who have the last laugh - researchers from the University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine, in collaboration with a group from Uppsala University in Sweden, have found a potential link between foie gras consumption and the development of a number of amyloidogenic diseases.

The amyloidogenic diseases include Alzheimer’s Disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), tuberculosis, diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis. They are termed “amyloidogenic” because they all involve a process called amyloidosis, whereby genetic mutations lead to the synthesis of abnormally folded and insoluble proteins which accumulate within or around cells and interfere with their function. In all the amyloidogenic diseases, the mutated proteins are believed to accumulate by a process called nucleation (or “seeding”).

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So much for saving the spotted owl

In the late 1970s, some U.S. forest scientists became engrossed by a small, reclusive owl that fed on rodents in the wet, lush and steadily disappearing old-growth forests of Oregon.

Environmental groups, looking for a legal wedge in their increasingly aggressive crusade to halt old-growth logging, soon caught wind of the concerns and sued to list the northern spotted owl among the nation's endangered species.

What followed was one of the most gut-grabbing economic and social upheavals in modern Oregon history. In the five years after 1990, timber employment dropped from 57,400 to 46,200 sending families to unemployment offices and food banks.

Now even the most optimistic biologists now admit that the docile owl -- revered and reviled as the most contentious symbol the Northwest has known -- will probably never fully recover.

Intensive logging of the spotted owl's old-growth forest home threw the first punch that sent the species reeling. But the knockout blow is coming from a direction that scientists who drew up plans to save the owl didn't count on: nature itself.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photo