A team involving the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC), has created a bait that can administer vaccines against bovine tuberculosis in wild boar without capturing or handling them. Because these animals are the main reservoir of the disease in Spain, the device is an improvement in controlling the disease, which affects livestock but that can be transmitted to humans through contact with animals or consumption of unpasteurized milk.

Christian Investigators Gortazar and Jose de la Fuente, Research Institute of hunting resources (center joint CSIC and the University of Castilla-La Mancha), in Ciudad Real, directed this study is the culmination of five years of work.

The Secretary of State for Rural Affairs and Water, Josep Puxeu, met yesterday with the environmental groups to assess various measures in the short and long term to stop the current deterioration of National Park Daimiel tables. The park across the most critical situation in its history by overexploitation of their aquifers, mismanagement and the recent fire in the protected space.

The organization SEO / BirdLife has conducted the first national inventory of marine birds in Spain. The project, unique in the world and presented yesterday with the support of the Ministry of Environment, Rural and Marine Affairs (MARM) and the European Commission identified 42 areas important for conservation of seabirds in Spanish.

After a steady increase of cases of invasive breast cancer among Spanish women during the ’80s and ’90s, incidence rates have declined sharply since 2001, a possible consequence of the widespread use of diagnostic tests, according to a new study led by researchers at the Instituto de Salud Carlos III. The authors attribute this to the presence of mass screening programs for breast cancer.

“In the ’80s and ’90s breast cancer did not stop growing in Spain. However, in the beginning of 2000 a turnaround and a year later, the descent is steep, “says Marina Pollan SINC, principal investigator of the study along with Robert Pastor, both experts from the National Center for Epidemiology at the Institute Health Carlos III.

Scientists at the National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) describe for the first time the genetic and epigenetic alterations by which short telomeres cause aging of the organism. The results of this study are published today in the American magazine PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

The most accepted hypothesis for why aging is the accumulation of damage in our genetic material (DNA), which would occur associated with the process of life itself. However, the nature of damage caused by aging is still under intense scientific debate. Recent work with genetically modified mice suggest that “free radicals”, a popular theory of aging, there appear to be the cause of premature aging of the organism.

A team of Canadian and U.S. scientists has found that five species of songbirds have a second breeding season during the annual migration cycle. These birds spend the summer in temperate zones of North America and winters in tropical Central and South America, but its scale advantage in western Mexico to breed a second time.

Until now, researchers knew that these species that migrate at night because the stars are guiding them on their journey and encounter fewer predators, raised during his stay in the temperate regions of the United States and Canada. The scientists now show that during the southward migration of birds have a second breeding season in western Mexico.

Researchers at the National Museum of Natural Sciences (CSIC), Universidad de Vigo and University of California Berkeley (USA) have proposed a new integrative approach to make reliable predictions on how climate change will affect terrestrial biodiversity.

Scientists propose predictive models that take into account not only climatic variables but also the evolutionary history of the species.