This year in Biology
Discover Magazine's Living World section recently published the Top 100 stories in Biology in 2008. Among these are interesting finds like self-recognition in magpies, and Josephoartigasia monesi in Uruguay, a rodent as big as a bull.
Of course there are the usual panic inducing suspects like: FDA approves products from cloned animals, which will have everyone frantically searching for the "uncloned" aisle in their local grocery store even though somewhere, deep down, they too know that cloning is so spectacularly expensive that it is extremely unlikely that anyone, after having gone through hell to generate a clone, would willingly sacrifice their test subject so you can have that perfect fillet mignon.
Finally, Spain gives great apes legal rights, urged on by the Great Ape Project that seeks to confer upon the great apes (bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas) the same legal rights as humans. Of course, now they'll have to pop out and arrest Frodo, a chimpanzee guilty of killing a child at Gombe. . . or hasn't anyone thought of that? oops.
Oh, and you can find ALL your answers by having your genome sequenced with a bit o' spare cash; today costs have dropped from 1 million to only $200,000 per genome. Results available in a month!
I'll end with the best news story of the whole year: 125,000 lowland gorillas are discovered in a the forests of the Republic of Congo according to the recent census by the Wildlife Conservation Society. Their close relations, the mountain gorilla, has the utter misfortune of being located in the Virunga volcanoes, nestling between Rwanda, the DRC and Uganda - their numbers today rest at about 1000.
