Is it such great news if a doc tells a patient "you now have two weeks to live, instead of one week as we thought previously". Hardly anything to celebrate.

"Earth's biodiversity continues to dwindle due to deforestation, climate change, over-exploitation and chemical runoff into rivers and oceans, said the study, published in Nature.

"The evidence is in -- humans really are causing extreme extinction rates," said co-author Stephen Hubbell, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California at Los Angeles."