A strange new menace has joined the long list of threats to corals, the tiny reef-building animals that create important habitat in our oceans.

A bacterium that attacks humans is also killing off a species of coral in the Caribbean, elkhorn coral, according to researchers who proved the link by infecting fragments of the coral with bacteria from human sewage.

‘This is quite an unusual discovery. It is the first time ever that a human disease has been shown to kill an invertebrate,’ said University of Georgia professor James Porter, one of the study researchers. ‘This is unusual because we humans usually get disease from wildlife, and this is the other way around.’

In humans, the pathogen Serratia marcescens is opportunistic, causing respiratory, wound and urinary tract infections. In coral, it causes a disease Porter and colleagues have dubbed ‘white pox’ for the white scars that appear on infected elkhorn coral. These scars appear where the coral’s living tissue has disappeared, leaving only its skeleton.

Worldwide coral faces a litany of threats. Hurricanes, which are predicted to increase in severity and number as a result of climate change, break coral to bits; warming water temperatures cause it to eject its photosynthetic algae and to […]

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Over the last decade, child poverty surged in 38 states and erased many of the gains in child well-being made in the last 20 years, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

In most states, the federal government considers a family of four living on less than $22,350 a year ‘poor.’ According to the report, child poverty increased 18 percent between 2000 and 2009 and today shapes the lives of nearly 15 million children.

The findings are the latest in a series of studies that reveal the real impact of the recession on family-level finances in the country, including stagnating and declining wages during the 2000s. These sharp changes in individual financial security may ultimately influence the nation’s future.

Children — particularly very young children — who experience even a bout of poverty are less likely to graduate from high school, are more likely to become very young parents, have more difficulties learning and earn less money than their non-poor peers as adults, said Patrick McCarthy, president and CEO of the Casey Foundation.

‘Child poverty is in some ways a leading indicator of how the country is going to be doing down the road,’ said McCarthy. ‘Nearly all […]

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Ethan Allen was at various times: reckless speculator, captain of the continent’s largest paramilitary force, outlaw with a £100 bounty on his head, American Revolutionary commander, prisoner of war, best-selling author, radical Deist philosopher, and founding father of Vermont. Despite this remarkable life, and despite a time when biographies of America’s Founding Fathers fall from the presses like rotten apples from a tree, in the last half-century only one full-length biography had been written about Ethan Allen. How could this be?

As Ethan Allen: His Life and Times, a new and frustrating biography by Willard Sterne Randall, shows, Allen is hard to write about. He poses a challenge not so much because he is different from more famous Founders like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Benjamin Franklin but because he resembles them perhaps a bit too much-in ways most Americans prefer not to think about.

Like Washington, Allen was self-taught. Like Jefferson, he descended from a family of land speculators. Like Franklin, he was of Puritan stock but turned away from the Calvinism of his forebears. Born in the Berkshire Mountains in 1738, Allen grew up amid religious ferment that little affected him. Pugnacious by intellect and temperament, he cussed and fought […]

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A new study finds that same-sex pairs of zebra finches are just as attached, loving and devoted to each other as those coupled with a member of the opposite sex.

Researchers gleaned this insight from a study of zebra finches, which prove great birds to document because of their highly vocal and playful habits. Led by Julie Elie from the University of California Berkeley, the team was interested in zebra finches’ behavior because the birds establish life-long relationships and are extremely social. A new study shows that homosexual bonds are just as strong as heterosexual bonds in zebra finches.

‘I’m interested in how animals establish relationships and how [they] use acoustic communication in their social interactions,’ Dr Elie told BBC Nature.

‘My observations of [them] led me to this surprising result: same-sex individuals would also interact in affiliative manners, like male-female pairs,’ she added.

Dr. Elie, along with colleagues Clementine Vignal and Nicolas Mathevon from the University of Saint-Etienne, raised a group of all male birds to adulthood, at which point nearly half of them coupled up and bonded. The team says the paired birds perched next to each other, sang, preened, and nuzzled beaks.

To see if the males would stray if introduced to […]

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The U.S. military has lost $360 million intended for combat and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan to the Taliban, criminals and local leaders during nearly a decade on the ground there.

A task force assembled last year by Gen. David Petraeus, then the commander of allied forces in Afghanistan and now the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, tallied the diversion of funds as part of a broader assessment of the war effort, The Associated Press reported Tuesday, after obtaining details of the report.

Putting a dollar figure on the widely acknowledged difficulties that the United States and its partners have had in battling corruption, Task Force 2010 worked to untangle the ties among companies, their subcontractors, and the insurgents and criminals - ‘malign actors

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