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Image courtesy of Save the Tasmanian Devil Program A killer cancer that is threatening to wipe Tasmanian devils off the map for good has been spreading from an original infected female 15 years ago via live cancer cells, according to evidence from genome sequences of the cancer and the animal, published online Thursday in Cell . Finding out how this happened could help save this species from extinction and it could also prepare researchers for the unlikely event that a contagious cancer ever appeared in humans. [More]

Is it ageism or common sense to ban rowdy children? A few months ago I wrote about a handful of restaurateurs that discouraged diners from bringing children into their establishments .

Not every story about endangered species is horrible. Sometimes there's some good news mixed in with the bad. Although none of these stories is worth dancing in the streets over, each nonetheless merits at least a little bit of celebration

Tasmanian devils ( Sarcophilus harrisii ) have been besieged by a highly contagious cancer that has been pushing the species ever-closer to extinction . In the past 15 years, Devil Facial Tumor Disease has spread throughout Australia's Tasmania island, killing most Tasmanian devils that catch it

Rodrigo Hamede, of the University of Tasmania, studies Tasmanian devils in the wild. He shot videos of some of the endangered carnivorous marsupials after he and his colleagues conducted a study of how much contact devils had with one another in Narawntapu National Park, on Tasmania's northern coast. [More]