Conservation paleobiology: putting the dead to work

Geohistorical data and analyses are playing an increasingly important role in conservation biology practice and policy. In this review, we discuss examples of how the near-time and deep-time fossil record can be used to understand the ecological and evolutionary responses of species to changes in their environment. We show that beyond providing crucial baseline data, the conservation paleobiology perspective helps us to identify which species will be most vulnerable and what kinds of responses will be most common. We stress that inclusion of geohistorical data in our decision-making process provides a more scientifically robust basis for conservation policies than those dependent on short-term observations alone.     

Apoptotic pathways: ten minutes to dead

For more than a decade, it has been apparent that apoptosis and other forms of cell death are often controlled at one or more crucial steps involving the mitochondria. Recent findings, including an elegant investigation in a recent issue of Cell (Hao et al., 2005), have helped to elucidate fundamental aspects of this involvement while raising puzzling new questions about mitochondrial routes to cellular demise. The emerging, if preliminary, perspective these new studies provide may represent either a refinement of our views of how cells die or, perhaps, the beginnings of what amounts to a reformulation of our ideas.