Dr. Frank van Breukelen is an Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He was invited to tell us about a new research project in this laboratory about some really cool mammals called tenrecs.

Once bathing in the waters of the southwestern United States, a fish, Cyprinodon macularius , found in the Death Valley basement, has surprisingly adapted after the drastic change in its aquatic environment. The adaptation of its metabolism to new conditions is an astonishing example of physiological plasticity.

Of course New York City needs the microbes in the soil and the roots from the trees and plants of the Catskill Mountains to clean up its drinking water.

Tiny pupfish have adapted their respiration to go without oxygen for long stretches.

And you thought you could hold your breath for a long time. Enter the desert pupfish, a tiny fish that has been playing evolutionary catch-up due to the extreme changes in its environment over the last 10,000 years.

The desert pupfish has evolved to go without oxygen for considerable periods of time to survive its harsh environment

Seeded with a $2.5 million grant from the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development and matching funds from UNLV, the institute will decode people’s genomes to predict individual susceptibility to disease, study treatment options and fine-tune drug dosages to minimize adverse effects, Executive Director Martin Schiller said.

Unseasonably warm temperatures over the past month have brought an early start to the allergy season.

The relict leopard frog’s journey into Southern Nevada’s landscape has seen its share of challenges.

Looking at a graph of human life expectancy over the past four millennia, you get how far medicine has come from diagnosing witchcraft and prescribing bloodletting. But it’s still so inexact that for every year we live, we gain about two months of life. That’s how fast research is improving health care, says Martin Schiller, adding: “It’s maybe the best buy in history for return on investment.”

A shrewlike creature in Madagascar that can hibernate for at least nine months of the year without waking may help reveal how mammals survived the cataclysm that ended the age of dinosaurs, researchers suggest.