Many species have already begun expanding their ranges to escape the warming climates and changes in precipitation, and may successfully escape significant population crashes. Animals with already dynamic ranges, for example, like caribou and wolves, are expected to be able to outrun climate change. But others, like primates and some rodents, may not respond in time, co-author Joshua Lawler, associate professor of environmental and forest sciences, said in a press release.

The researchers combined projections of the pace of climate change with descriptions of the climate suited to each species, with assumptions about how often and swiftly each species might move to expand its range. Assuming that species disperse once per generation suggests that species that mature slowly, like howler monkeys, would move less often and be slower to respond to changes in climate. Tiny animals like shrews are also expected to fare poorly, because while they might mature quickly and disperse often, they only travel short distances. And the model is conservative, assuming animals will always disperse in the direction most likely to benefit them, and at maximum speed.

“Conservation planners could help some species keep pace with climate change by focusing on connectivity—on linking together areas that could serve as pathways to new territories, particularly where animals will encounter human-land development,” lead author Carrie Schloss, a University of Washington research analyst in environmental and forest sciences, said in a press release. Furthermore, “reducing non-climate-related stressors could help make populations more resilient,” she added. “But ultimately, reducing emissions, and therefore reducing the pace of climate change, may be the only certain method to make sure species are able to keep pace with climate change.”

Last year’s Salary Survey saw the biggest numbers for researchers in biophysics, virology, cancer/oncology, genomics, neuroscience, developmental biology, and immunology—fields that largely encompass those a­reas of research valued by the aging baby-boomer population. Which fields will fare best this year?

Take 5 minutes to tell us how you’re doing in this year’s Salary Survey. We’ll break it down by life science specializations, geographic location, degree, job title and more, and report the results in our November issue this year. The more responses we get, the more robust and current the data will be. So fill out the survey today, and encourage your friends to do the same.

Click here for the survey.

The FDA’s detailed rules, which appeared in the Federal Register at the beginning of May, hinge upon state-of-the-art testing methods, which should make determining the sterility of biological products and the materials used to make them simpler. Specifically, the rules eliminate specified sterility test methods, culture media formulae, and culture media test requirements; eliminate the specified membrane filtration procedures required for certain products; eliminate specified sterility test requirements for most bulk material; modify the repeat sterility test requirements, so that repeat tests will occur only once for each product lot; and replace storage and maintenance requirements, testing sample sizes, and test interpretations with simplified guidelines.

In short, the FDA is reacting to the evolution of testing technology with rapid and advanced impurity detection capabilities to provide “manufacturers the flexibility to take advantage of methods as they become available, provided that these methods meet certain criteria,” according to the Federal Register entry.

The rules go into effect on June 4.

All major medical organizations recommend at least 6 months of exclusive breastfeeding and many encourage breastfeeding beyond infancy, said the ABM. Additionally, there is no scientific basis to claims that breastfeeding beyond infancy is harmful to mother or infant. Yet many readers reacted to the Time cover with disgust at the idea of a breastfeeding 3-year-old: the Atlantic Wire called the image “PG-13,” and The Right Scoop went so far as to call it “soft porn.”

The cover, and the subsequent reaction it sparked from the general public, is “a terrible disservice to women’s health,” Alison Stuebe, a maternal-fetal medicine physician at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, wrote last Friday (May 11) on the ABM’s blog. She references the fact that the photo depicts a young, attractive woman in a tank top and skinny jeans and a boy wearing “big kid” clothes and appearing tall by standing on a small chair. “Every aspect of the photo is engineered to evoke sexual undertones,” she wrote, “and Time’s tabloid approach has (predictably) brought out a mob of people saying breastfeeding is ‘sick’ and ‘perverted,’” when it is simply normal physiology, Stuebe argued.

“Ideally, Time Magazine should have featured a photograph of breastfeeding that would have supported the concept of breastfeeding as both the cultural and biological norm,” ABM president Arthur Eidelman said in a statement. “However, by using a staged, provocative picture of an atypical situation, Time chose to generate controversy for commercial ends at the potential expense of well-accepted public health recommendations.”

“This is the first significant advance on predatory lures for 100+ years and the first experiment really addressing why a lure should actually work,” John Endler, an evolutionary ecologist at Deakin University in Australia, wrote in a email. Endler, who was not involved with the research, co-authored a study in 1990 that linked female preference for orange guppies with the prevalence of orange-colored males.

That predators might have co-opted a prey species’ color preference in order to entice that prey is a “new, interesting twist” on color bias, which states that animals evolve preferences and even high visual acuity for colors relevant to their survival and reproduction, added Greg Grether, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the work. Grether’s work, for example, has shown that female guppies’ love of orange pushed male guppies to maintain the right orange shade.

During a trip to Trinidad to study other details of guppy color vision, Cameron Weadick of Helen Rodd’s University of Toronto lab and his collaborators noticed that prawns, which are believed to be insensitive to orange, often had orange spots on their pincers. Even more curious, the prawns often adopted a stationary, pincer-open stance that hinted they might be lying in wait, said Weadick. It spurred the notion that the spots might be lures for the orange-sensitive guppies.

Juvenile prawn with orange-spotted pincers. <span>Cameron Weadick</span>

To test this hypothesis, the researchers made model prawns, painted brown, with either uniform claws or claws with orange or green spots. They then placed female guppies in aquaria with the model prawns and charted how long the guppies stayed in the “safe” zone, near the prawn’s tail, or ventured into the “danger” zone, near its head.

They found that guppies from prawn-filled streams stayed near the tail in solid brown and green-spotted models, but spent more time near the head—and thus the pincers—in models with orange spots, suggesting their preference for the color was luging them to the spots.

A second set of experiments with live crayfish showed little effect of orange spots, however, possibly because additional cues of a live predator, such as movement and smell, overrode the guppies’ penchant for orange. Or it could simply be that the crayfish were not as convincing predators as their prawn models, said Weadick, or because the researchers had painted them with orange nail polish, unwilling to paint live animals with the same heavy acrylic paint they’d used on the models, and more research is needed to differentiate between these possibilities

Future work will also help determine which guppies are the most easily lured, said Endler, who suspects there may be differences in male and female guppy responses to orange pincers. If males respond equally to females, it would suggest that the prawns are taking advantage of a food bias, rather than a sexual bias, he said.

Additionally, said Grether, how this lure affects the evolution of guppy populations in the wild is not clear. “You might expect a weaker preference for orange if prawns use it as a lure,” Grether explained, but males might also “ramp up” their orangeness if female attraction is weakened.

In 2009, a chimpanzee named Santino at Furuvik Zoo in Gävle, Sweden, made global headlines for his surprisingly premeditated attacks on zoo visitors: Santino calmly created small piles of stones in the morning before the zoo opened, then later used those stockpiles to pelt zoo visitors who appeared to agitate him—strong evidence that nonhuman animals could plan ahead. But skeptics argued that Santino wasn’t necessarily planning ahead, and was instead repeating previously learned responses to the zoo visitors via a cognitively simpler process called associative learning, ScienceNOW reported.

But now, Santino is back and making his intentions even more clear. In a new PLoS ONE study, published May 9, researchers at the University of Lund in Sweden describe how Santino has now begun to conceal the stones under heaps of hay and behind logs, deliberately and deceptively concealing his ammunition so as to get a closer aim at his targets. The new behavior, recorded during the summer of 2010, suggests that Santino anticipates and plans for a future situation rather than simply responding repetitively to a past one.

“No matter what mechanisms lie behind the behavior,” senior author Mathias Osvath of Lund University told SciecneNOW, Santino is engaging in planning for the future, and “that is not trivial.”

Tower threat

<span>Wikimedia Commons, <a href=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Migrating_Birds_on_Saltmarshes_-_geograph.org.uk_-_691933.jpg>Ian Sharp</a></span>

Each year, collisions with communication towers in Canada and the United States kill about 6.8 million birds—nearly all of them migratory, according to a study published April 25 in PLoS ONE. That’s equivalent to 27 times the number of birds killed in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, a major environmental disaster.

Researchers analyzed previous studies of bird victims at 38 towers across the two countries, then extrapolated to all towers measuring 197 feet or higher. The most deadly towers were tall towers, some so high they reach into altitudes at which migratory birds travel, and those with steady-burning red lights, noted Live Science. The lights cause the birds to circle the towers and run into cables, called guy wires, which hold the towers up.

“This is a tragedy that does not have to be,” lead author Travis Longcore at the University of Southern California said in a press release. “With these towers, we are killing birds in an unnatural way. This is senseless.” The authors suggest replacing steady burning red lights with strobe lights, avoiding flood lights and guy wires, and limiting tower heights.

Dog empathy

<span>Flickr, <a href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/davefayram/3149990464/>Dave Fayram</a></span>

When you yawn, it’s likely that nearby friends and family will yawn as well. Humans tend to “catch” the yawns of their friends and acquaintances more than strangers, suggesting that the behavior may be tied to feelings of empathy. But what about your dog? Scientists at the University of Porto in Portugal have found that dogs yawn even when they simply hear the sound of their owners yawning, further evidence of the ability of canines to empathize with humans.

In the study, published in the July issue of Animal Cognition,  canines yawned five times more often when they heard humans they knew yawning as opposed to control sounds, such as a stranger yawning or a computer-produced sound. Contagious yawning has also been observed in baboons, macaques, and chimpanzees.

The Hyrax’s song

A small social mammal, the rock hyrax of the Middle East and Africa has surprisingly complex vocalizations, according to an April 18 study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The brown, stocky animals are known to be extremely vocal, with males singing songs that can last several minutes. Now, scientists have discovered that the order of the notes in those songs is significant, suggesting that the songs have syntax, the BBC News reported. In addition, hyraxes from different regions have different dialects, the authors found.

“This is something you find very, very rarely amongst mammals,” lead author Arik Kershenbaum of the University of Haifa in Israel told the BBC. The only other mammals known to have complex vocalizations include primates, cetaceans, and bats.

Ganging up

<span>Wikimedia Commons, <a href=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spinner_Dolphin_right_off_the_coast_of_Carrillo.jpg>Jackiemora01</a></span>

Animals of all sizes can form gangs in the wild, according to two new studies of bottlenose dolphins and small songbirds called great tits. A five-year study of dolphins in western Australia found that the mammals travel in open troops, forming alliances to herd females, mount attacks on other troops, and even form larger “armies” to defend against aggressive groups, BBC Nature reported.

A second study found that great tits, small hole-nesting birds, are more likely to form an anti-predator mob with their neighbors if those neighbors are familiar from the previous year. “There are two explanations,” senior author Ada Grabowska-Zhang from the University of Oxford told BBC News. “One: birds join their neighbors because they think: ‘My nest could be next.’ Or they join because their neighbors have joined their mobs before, and they know that if they don’t reciprocate, they’ll be left alone next time. It’s sort of great tit tit-for-tat.”

Big peepers = faster runners?

What do cheetahs and horses have in common? They’re fast, and they have big eyes. Maximum running speed is the most important variable influencing mammalian eye size other than body size, according to a study of 50 mammals presented at the 2012 American Association of Physical Anthropology meeting held in April in Portland, Oregon.

Species with larger eyes usually have higher visual acuity, said author Chris Kirk of the University of Texas at Austin in a press release. So large eyes give animals like horses and cheetahs “better vision to avoid colliding with obstacles in their environment when they’re moving very quickly,” he said.

It was previously believed that the time of day that an animal is active (nocturnal or diurnal) was a main factor driving the evolution of mammalian eye size, but subsequent research demonstrated that activity pattern only has a modest effect on eye size. By comparison, body mass plus maximum running speed together can explain 89 percent of the variation in eye size among mammals, the researchers found.

The researchers, who published their findings yesterday (May 14) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that this date likely also applies to the other vulva-like art previously found in the cave. “The fact that the most recognizable image on the newly discovered surface falls broadly within the range of ovoid forms traditionally interpreted as vulva leads us to suppose that the above dates apply to other such images from Castanet, many of which were located within a few meters of the engraving described here,” they wrote.

The images also differ greatly from the drawings at Chauvet, such as the fact that they are displayed in the areas of the cave used for sleeping and eating, as opposed to deeper areas beyond the prehistoric humans’ living space, suggesting regional differences in artistic traditions. “The vulvar tradition in the Vézère Valley seems to constitute a distinct regional variant within a mosaic of graphic and plastic expression across Europe in the Early Aurignacian,” the authors wrote.

After World War II, Sweden instituted educational reforms, including increasing the mandatory schooling time. But before instituting this change nation-wide, the government directed a controlled study between 1949 and 1962. Some districts adopted a 9 year program while some continued to school children for 8 years. When the 9 year program’s benefits became clear, such as more children qualifying for secondary school, it was adopted country-wide in 1962.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, tested whether the extra year had an effect on health outcomes by looking at death records from 1961 and 2007. They found that the extra year correlated with a lower risk of dying after mid-life (between 40 and 70). Because the reforms were designed to test the effect of differing educations, the study “supports the view that education has a causal role in health,” Marcus Richards, a cognitive epidemiologist at University College London, told Nature.

The new system represents a marked improvement over existing eye implants for restoring vision, which tend to be bulky electrical devices that require the implantation of electrical wiring as well as an external battery source. In contrast, the new implant consists of a thin, silicon photodiode array that acts as a wireless light detector.

“Surgeons should be much happier with us. We’ve just got the one implant,” Stanford’s James Loudin, who led the project, told Nature. “Other approaches require pretty big pieces of hardware to be stuck in the body: 1–2 centimeters in size.”

The person wearing the implant would also need to wear a pair of glasses fitted with a miniature camera that records images and processes them into pulses of near-infrared light that are shone back at the eye. When the light signals reach the implant, it in turns stimulates the retinal neurons with an electrical signal.

Most dialysis patients need some epoetin or a similar drug to avoid severe anemia, and the higher the desired hematocrit, the higher the dose required. The study aimed to compare the effects of standard epoetin doses, which maintain patients’ hematocrit around 30 percent, and much higher doses, to raise hematocrit to normal (42 percent). The trial was stopped early in May 1996, just 29 months after it began, because of a trend toward increased deaths and heart attacks in the patients given the higher doses of epoetin. This was the first outcomes trial to show epoetin might be harmful. An editorial accompanying the August 1998 publication of the study in the New England Journal of Medicine, described how, “disappointingly,” there was a trend toward more deaths in the higher dosage group, but argued that the study still supported the recommendations of the National Kidney Foundation’s guidelines, published in the year before, that sufficient epoetin be used to maintain hematocrit between 33 and 36 percent—the upper half of the US Food and Drug Administration’s recommendation at that time—to reduce transfusions, improve quality of life, and possibly reduce deaths.

In March 2012, 14 years later, I published my own analysis of the trial based on Amgen’s clinical trial report, which I obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. The results were dramatically different.

In 1998, although the risk of death and heart attack was significantly greater among patients receiving the higher doses of epoetin, the NEJM editors reportedly accepted Amgen’s position that the statistics should be adjusted because the company and the trials’ leaders terminated the trial early based on the recommendation of the data safety monitoring board. Therefore the trial results were reported as showing only a trend toward—and not solid evidence for—increased harm. The 1998 paper did not report the unadjusted statistics, or state that the statistical rules employed required the p value to reach 0.00088 to be considered significant, a much high bar than the traditional 0.05. This was also not appreciated by most experts.

According to the 1998 NEJM publication, the only definitive risk from higher epoetin doses was an increased risk of clotting the fistula from which blood is taken to perform hemodialysis, a common and less severe problem. And the higher dose group benefited by receiving fewer transfusions and enjoying higher measures of the “physical function” component of quality of life.

Thus, while the 1998 NEJM publication discouraged high epoetin doses to target hematocrit to 42 percent because of a trend toward increased risks, it also identified clear benefits of exceeding a hematocrit target of 30 percent—fewer transfusions and better quality of life. Epoetin use had already started to increase following the release of National Kidney Foundation’s 1997 KDOQI anemia guidelines, which incidentally, were funded by Amgen. After the NEJM paper was published, epoetin use in dialysis patients exploded, becoming a $2.5 billion a year market in the US alone.

By 2006, new KDOQI guidelines, again supported by Amgen, recommended all dialysis and kidney disease patients should receive doses of epoetin to maintain a hematocrit of 33 to 39 percent based on quality of life improvements—citing as evidence the Normal Hematocrit Trial and some smaller trials.

The results of my own analysis, on the other hand, published this March in Kidney International, showed that the quality of life scores had not improved in the higher dosing arm. The results I found in the Amgen report, filed with the FDA in 1996, showed that bigger epoetin doses to target higher hematocrit did not improve the physical function quality of life component at all, and had significantly increased the risk of death, heart attack, other thrombotic events, and hospitalizations.

The only benefit from higher epoetin doses was reduced transfusions, though the benefit was minor: one needed to treat 10 patients for 14 months at an additional epoetin cost of about $200,000 to avoid one person being transfused. Increased hospitalizations would further increase the total cost of higher epoetin doses.

The strikingly different results were because the 1998 NEJM publication had replaced the predefined outcomes and analyses with statistical adjustments and post hoc assessments, including replacing the total lack of effect of higher doses on physical function scores with the observation that patients with higher physical function scores had higher hematocrit, presumably because healthier patients respond better to epoetin. The wording was sufficiently unclear that even the KDOQI anemia guidelines misread the quality of life results as indicating that higher doses of epoetin to target higher hematocrit had caused an improvement in quality of life, when in fact, the trial results showed no improvement.

The academic authors of the 1998 publication state there was no intent to mislead, claiming the NEJM editors removed from drafts all the adverse results that I reported in 2012. They also state the 1998 publication clearly discouraged targeting hematocrit to 42 percent. What the 1998 publication did not do, however, was make clear, as my report does, that higher epoetin doses carry great risks, while the only benefit was a meager reduction in transfusion risk at great monetary cost.

Of course, even if there was no intentional deception, the effect was to force experts to say targeting hematocrit to about 42 percent using higher epoetin doses improved quality of life and reduced transfusions, and prevented them from saying such management significantly increased deaths, cardiac events, thrombotic events, and hospitalizations. Amgen controlled the debate, and by 2012 had made $37 billion from epoetin sales in the United States alone.

And if the intent was not to mislead, why not just publish subsequent articles clarifying the results, especially the quality of life results? The anemia workgroups that developed the KDOQI guidelines included one of the 1998 NEJM authors. Why not notify the KDOQI organization and other workgroup members that they were misreading the 1998 NEJM results? I cannot imagine what Amgen would have done if they had intended to mislead.

I waited 1,260 days to receive the trial report from the FDA. Two weeks before receiving the report, on June 24, 2011, the FDA released a safety warning and new label advice for use of epoetin in chronic kidney disease. It withdrew the previous recommended dose and hematocrit target of 30-36 percent. The new label states that there is no known safe dose of epoetin, no proven safe hematocrit target, and when using epoetin in dialysis patients, decrease or stop the epoetin when hematocrit exceeds 33 percent. The label now reports the Normal Hematocrit Trial’s hazard ratio and confidence intervals for death and heart attack and all-cause death as significantly higher in the higher hematocrit arm, just as I reported them earlier this year.

Finally, as strange as it seems, I am now the sole author of the publication on the predefined primary and secondary results of the largest outcomes trial of epoetin in dialysis patients, and I didn’t even participate in the trial. Perhaps the FDA will make the epoetin label cite my paper.

Daniel Coyne is a Professor of Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.