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(Reuters) - Plants and animals are shrinking because of warmer temperatures and lack of water, researchers said on Monday, warning it could have profound implications for food production in years ahead. "The worst-case scenarios ... are that food crops and animals will shrink enough to have real implications for food security," Assistant Professor David Bickford, of the National University of Singapore's biological sciences department, said. Bickford and colleague Jennifer Sheridan trawled through fossil records and dozens of studies which showed that many species of plants and creatures such as spiders, beetles, bees, ants and cicadas have shrunk over time in...

The icecap may not be the only thing shrinking in the Arctic. The genitals of polar bears in east Greenland are apparently dwindling in size due to industrial pollutants. Scientists report this shrinkage could, in the worst case scenario, endanger polar bears there and elsewhere by spoiling their love lives and causing their numbers to peter out. In fact, all marine mammals could get affected by these pollutants, "especially the Arctic fox, killer whale and pilot whales," wildlife veterinarian and toxicologist Christian Sonne at the National Environmental Research Institute of Denmark in Roskilde told LiveScience. These animals bodies also carry...

Sat, December 3, 2005 BARRIE -- A sex assault trial that hung on claims of a large penis was turned into a "cheap joke" by media coverage, a superior court judge said yesterday as she found the accused guilty. Justice Margaret Eberhard said she was disturbed after receiving calls "from afar" and was ribbed numerous times over the trial in which a man claimed he could not be guilty of rape because his penis is too big. "Whether I find him guilty or innocent -- he is publicly humiliated," she told court just before finding the man guilty. "Nowhere was...

Swallows are getting sexier. Male barn swallows attract females with long tail feathers, and European researchers have observed that over the last 20 years those feathers have become much longer. "We've demonstrated quite a dramatic change in a short period of time," said Dr. Anders Pape Moller, an evolutionary biologist at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, who conducted the research with Dr. Tibor Szep of the College of Nyiregyhaza in Hungary. The findings are to be published in The Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Advertisement Experiments suggest that the males' tails act as advertising for good genes because males...

Over the past couple of months, my DUmmie FUnnies PING List has grown very rapidly until it now numbers 252 Freepers. Okay, so how big is your Ping List? Maybe I'm suffering from Ping List Envy but I have to know how big the other Ping Lists are.