As the CEO of The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens, one of my responsibilities is to stay abreast of the latest conservation research to help ensure that our educational message is accurate and up to date. A scientific paper that crossed my desk recently summed up the human-caused pressures on the natural world in a way that is hard to ignore. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science and the California Institute of Technology estimated the biomass of all the living things on Earth and the results are eye opening.…

Earth’s ultimate survivors can weather extreme heat, cold, radiation and even the vacuum of space. Now the U.S. military hopes these tiny critters called tardigrades can teach us about true toughness. These animals are pipsqueaks, only about the size of a period. Under a microscope they look like some combination of chubby bear and single-eyed alien. And they are the closest life gets to indestructible. No water? No worries. Tardigrades survive. Antarctic cold, 300-degree heat (150 degrees Celsius), a lack of oxygen, even punishing radiation doesn’t stop these animals. They…

Drinking one bottle of wine a week is as cancer-causing as smoking up to ten cigarettes during the same time period, a new study claims. British researchers found that downing a weekly bottle of vino is on par with smoking five cigarettes for men and 10 cigarettes for women, according to the study, published Thursday in the journal BMC Public Health. In total, the wine consumption increases a man’s “lifetime cancer risk” by 1 percent and woman’s by 1.4 percent, according to authors of the study, who crunched U.K. health…

Diets lacking in healthy food are responsible for more deaths across the globe than smoking, a major new study has concluded. The research, published in British journal The Lancet, claims that around 11 million deaths per year — or one in five — are a result of a poor diet. The diets cutting lives short were found to be particularly high in salt and too low in whole grains and fruit. The analysis, part of The Global Burden of Disease Study, saw researchers assess the diets of people in 195…

A huge study suggests the Apple Watch can detect a worrisome irregular heartbeat at least sometimes — but experts say more work is needed to tell if using wearable technology to screen for heart problems really helps. More than 419,000 Apple Watch users signed up for the unusual study, making it the largest ever to explore screening seemingly healthy people for atrial fibrillation, a condition that if untreated eventually can trigger strokes. Stanford University researchers reported Saturday that the watch didn’t panic flocks of people, warning just half a percent…