A family have been forced to hand over a much-loved pet fox - after the RSPCA removed it from their exotic animal rescue centre.

Dave Robinson, who runs the centre from his home, is heartbroken after saying goodbye to Scarlett.

The 18-month-old animal, which was born in captivity and has never lived in the wild, has been with the Robinsons for three months. Scarlett's parents were also captive.

Dave Robinson took Scarlett into his home in Failsworth, Greater Manchester, after answering a Facebook post from a woman who needed to give her up.

Until recently, endangered foxes on California's Catalina Island were suffering from one of the highest prevalences of tumors ever documented in a wildlife population, UC Davis scientists have found. But treatment of ear mites appears to be helping the wild animals recover.

Roughly half of adult foxes examined between 2001 and 2008 had tumors in their ears, with about two-thirds of those malignant, according to a UC Davis study published this month in the journal PLOS ONE.

A complementary study, also led by UC Davis and published in PLOS ONE today, found that treatments with acaracide, a chemical agent used to kill ear mites in dogs and cats, reduced the prevalence of ear mite infection dramatically, from 98 percent to 10 percent among treated foxes at the end of the six-month trial. Ear canal inflammation and other signs of developing ear tumors also dropped.

So why is the observation so exciting? It confirms what astrophysicists had predicted could happen when a black hole is force-fed a large amount of gas (in this case, a whole star) - a fast-moving jet of plasma can escape from near the event horizon.

Until recently, it was assumed that black holes had such strong gravity that nothing, not even light, could escape them. But researchers such as Stephen Hawking and Gerard 't Hooft have been able to show that energy can escape a black hole, and now it seems that matter can escape from near the event horizon too.