Mountain surprise for threatened snails

endeavours, but should not be confused as crucial to our life on this planet. My colleagues and friends quickly point out that I am teaching people important things about the knowledge we have acquired through careful scientific exploration. Yeah, yeah. But the students I teach are already very well educated, and I often feel like the post-dinner entertainment, perhaps marginally better than MTV. But I do feel strongly that we have an obligation to the public, not only because they are footing the bill through taxes, but because no human being should be allowed to live in today's world without an education in the sciences. Every bit of breaking news is more readily interpretable with a background in the sciences. As I am writing this essay on March 26, 2007, the front page of the New York Times has these headlines: " Anna Nicole Smith's Death is called 'Accidental " , " Northern Ireland Rivals Reach Deal " and " Aged, Frail and Denied Care by Their Insurers ". The first makes a critical psychological distinction that bears on legal issues, specifically, the difference between intended and accidental actions with identical consequences; if you are a utilitarian, you might not care too much about this, but then again, recent findings in the neurosciences reveal critical circuitry in the brain that, when damaged, leads to greater utilitarian moral judgments. The second headline links to our evolved capacity to create in-group and out-group distinctions, but as the philosopher Peter Singer has noted, our equally powerful capacity to change who is 'in' and who is 'out'. And the third headline speaks to the science of aging, the technologies now available for bio-engineering, and the ethical issues that accompany these hot button topics. As scientists, we must educate. We must step out of the university and into the public arena, taking every spare moment we have to 'preach' our passion. they were then dissected and samples of foot muscle from each individual freeze-dried and stored. From material taken from a sample of the 683 snail muscles preserved in this collection, the authors were able to assign a genotype for a mitochondrial marker amongst both the museum specimens and individuals from current captive and wild populations. The researchers found five primary clades amongst the snails for this marker and were surprised to find that living snails, mostly from the mountains, could still be assigned to …