Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution have discovered data that suggests one of Hawaii’s most dominant plants, Metrosideros, has been a resident of the islands far longer than previously believed.

Since the reporting of the so-called “hobbit” fossil from the island of Flores in Indonesia, debate has raged as to whether these remains are of modern humans (Homo sapiens), reduced, for some reason, in stature, or whether they represent a new species, Homo floresiensis.

Sub-Saharan Africa has been experiencing phenomenal population growth since the beginning of the XXth Century, following several centuries of population stagnation attributable to the slave trade and colonization. The region’s population in fact increased from 100 million in 1900 to 770 million in 2005.

The Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, one of the most important long-term research efforts in the Amazon, is imperiled by new colonization proposed by the Brazilian federal agency SUFRAMA, according to a commentary in the July 26, 2007 journal Nature, co-authored by William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Regina Luizão of Brazil’s National Institute for Amazonian Research.

A researcher at the University of Missouri-Columbia has examined the slash-and-burn farming method traditionally used by the Iban, a widespread indigenous population that lives in northwestern Borneo in Southeast Asia. Researchers have long argued about the environmental effects of this type of agriculture.