> | KB | > | Results |
Baikal, Biwa and Bosuntwi. Maracaibo, Malawi and Matano. Tule, Tahoe and Titicaca.Ancient lakes, they're called: waterbodies more than 130,000 years old. Over their long histories, they've seen countless changes—warming and cooling cycles, wet and dry periods, altered biology and chemistry.
Brassica rapa plants pollinated by bumblebees evolve more attractive flowers. But this evolution is compromised if caterpillars attack the plant at the same time. As bees pollinate them less effectively, the plants increasingly self-pollinate. In a greenhouse evolution experiment, scientists at ...
A large portion of a plant is hidden below the ground. This buried root system is essential for the plant: it provides stability, water, and food. In contrast to mammals, where the body plan is final at birth, the formation of new root branches ensures that the root system keeps growing througho ...
In coral reef ecosystems, amid stony corals, fronds of algae and schools of fish, microorganisms are essential for recycling nutrients—transforming bits of organic matter into forms of nitrogen and phosphorus, for example, that are useful to photosynthetic organisms.
An EPFL doctoral student has come up with methods to map out forests more effectively using aerial remote sensing, in support of on-the-ground forest inventories.
Micro-encapsulated CO2 sorbents (MECS)—tiny, reusable capsules full of a sodium carbonate solution that can absorb carbon dioxide from the air—are a promising technology for capturing carbon from the atmosphere.
At least one running argument among cat lovers is now over: Whiskers, Lucy and Tigger are definitely better off staying indoors, scientists reported Wednesday.
On March 17, 2002, the German-U.S. satellite duo GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) was launched to map the global gravitational field with unprecedented precision. The mission lasted 15 years, more than three times as long as expected. When the two satellites burned up in the Earth ...
Researchers at The University of Western Australia have found that although the Indian Ocean is the world's biggest dumping ground for plastic waste, nobody seems to know where it goes.
Understanding how biodiversity is shaped by multiple forces is crucial to protect rare species and unique ecosystems.
A new study led by researchers at the University of Miami's (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science found that smoke from fires in Africa may be the most important source of a key nutrient -- phosphorus -- that acts as a fertilizer in the Amazon rainforest, Tropical Atlantic and ...
Recent primate research has had a heavy focus on a few charismatic species and nationally protected parks and forests, leaving some lesser known primates and their habitats at risk, according researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Santa Clara University.
Scientists believe that the Earth is currently going through its sixth mass extinction event. However, there may have been another such incident in our planet's past that researchers had overlooked until now, according to a study published in the journal Historical Biology.
A team of researchers from Kyoto University, Primate Cognition Research Group and Conservation through Public Health, has found that wild mountain gorillas living in Uganda play very much like humans when having fun in the water. In their paper published in the journal Primates, the group descri ...
Honey bees are under extreme pressure. The number of honey bee colonies in the US has been declining at an average rate of almost 40% since 2010. The biggest contributor to this decline is viruses spread by a parasite, Varroa Destructor. But this isn't a natural situation. The parasite is spread ...
The caterpillar form of an unassuming, small, white butterfly is among the world's most invasive pests affecting agricultural crops, and a newly published paper by a consortium of scientists documents how humans have helped it spread for thousands of years.
University of Kansas plant biologists Carolyn Wessinger and Lena Hileman appreciate the sheer beauty of a field of colorful wildflowers as much as the next person. But what really gets their adrenaline pumping is understanding the evolutionary forces that render Earth's blooms in such a stunning ...
A team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has found that when bees experience positive versus negative events, their brains process and remember the events differently. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes their study o ...
Transgenic mosquitoes released in Brazil in an effort to reduce the population of disease-bearing insects have successfully bred and passed on genes to the native mosquito population, a new Yale research study published Sept. 10 in the journal Scientific Reports has found.
Scientists have used historic DNA to discover some of the highest-risk populations of the endangered dugong are so genetically distinct, losing them would be the equivalent of losing a species of elephant.
Birthplace exerts a lifelong influence on butterflies as well as humans, new research reveals.n a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Macquarie University ARC Future Fellow Associate Professor Darrell Kemp reveals that the American passionfruit ...
A team of biologists has put on their detective hats to investigate the complicated bacterium behind citrus greening, a problematic plant disease that has felled citrus orchards across Florida and threatened the Sunshine State's once prosperous orange crop production.
The largest glacier in the Alps is visibly suffering the effects of global warming. ETH researchers have now calculated how much of the Aletsch Glacier will still be visible by the end of the century. In the worst-case scenario, a couple of patches of ice will be all that remains.
There’s a whole world behind the scenes at natural history museums that most people never see. Museum collections house millions upon millions of dinosaur bones, pickled sharks, dried leaves, and every other part of the natural world you can think of–more than could ever be put on display.
The creation of all-male or all-female groups of animals, known as monosex populations, has become a potentially useful approach in aquaculture and livestock rearing.
Achieving strength and extensibility at the same time has so far been a great challenge in material engineering: increasing strength has meant losing extensibility and vice versa. Now Aalto University and VTT researchers have succeeded in overcoming this challenge, with inspiration from nature.
Climate change increasingly threatens communities all over the world. News of fires, floods and coastal erosion devastating lives and livelihoods seems almost constant. The latest fires in Queensland and New South Wales mark the start of the earliest bushfire season the states have ever seen.
Although peatlands make up only 3 percent of the Earth's surface, they store one third of the soil carbon trapped in soils globally. Preserving peatlands is therefore of paramount importance for mitigating climate change, provided that these vulnerable environments are not themselves threatened ...
An international team of scientists found that a collision in the asteroid belt 470 million years ago diversified life on Earth. The study published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances showed that the breakup of a major asteroid between Jupiter and Mars filled the entire inner solar sys ...
The deep, cold waters off the rocky coast of Point Sur, California, are home to an unexpected community of organisms that most people associate with tropical settings—corals. Scientist Charlie Boch and his colleagues recently compared different methods to restore deep-sea coral by transplanting ...
Ancient, distinct, continent-sized regions of rocks, isolated since before the collision that created the Moon 4.5 billion years ago, exist hundreds of miles below the Earth's crust, offering a window into the building blocks of our planet, according to new research.
For the first-time ever, scientists have deployed animal-borne cameras on pangolins—the world's most trafficked wild mammal.They look like an armored anteater (they're not, though they do eat ants), curl up in a ball like an armadillo, but are more closely related to dogs.
Since the 1990s, our planet has lost nearly three million square kilometres of wilderness areas—parts of the world where human impact has been absent or minimal, according to a study which found that conserving such regions can cut the Earth's extinction risk by half.
The sense of smell is one of the most poorly understood of the five major senses. But now an international team of scientists led by Laurel Yohe of Stony Brook University suggests a new method to quantify olfactory receptors by sequencing them in vampire bats may hold the key to unraveling the m ...
The biodiversity buzz is alive and well in Fiji, but climate change, noxious weeds and multiple human activities are making possible extinction a counter buzzword.
As scientists observe the force of nature through a satellite weather tracker, they only see the day's events. To observe the long-term atmospheric influence, University of Cincinnati geologists are taking research a step further by tracking and measuring the distribution of sulfur in plants in ...
Iowa State University researchers have found a natural way to add color to clothing using the leftover grounds from your daily cup of coffee.
The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, was one of Australia's most enigmatic native species.It was the largest marsupial predator to survive until the arrival of Europeans but carried its babies in a pouch like a kangaroo or koala.
Scientists hope to harness fungi that decompose the most abundant type of biomass in wood, lignocellulose. Lignocellulose could be used to create the building-blocks of polymers for bioproducts.
When disease shows up in wild animal populations, there aren't pharmacies or vets to turn to. The best solution might actually be the one thing they spend their lives avoiding—predators.
In a group of animals, who deals with new information coming from the environment? Researchers from the University of Konstanz and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior have discovered that the answer lies not in who, but in where: information can be processed, not only by individual anima ...
To combat the abuse and degradation of the world's coral reefs, researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and the Technion Institute of Technology have developed various 3-D printed corals that could become new habitats. In some instances, the fish actually preferred them to natura ...
Every year, a "dead zone" the size of Massachusetts sprawls across the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi River, which travels through the nation's farm belt, sweeps excess fertilizer and dumps the chemicals into the Gulf, where they feed rampant algae, deplete oxygen, and kill marine life.
Queensland Museum researchers have been part of a rescue mission to preserve a centuries-old Aboriginal tree carving, helping document it for future generations using technology known as photogrammetry.
Western Australia's famous 3.5-billion-year-old stromatolites contain microbial remains of some of the earliest life on Earth, UNSW scientists have found.Scientists have found exceptionally preserved microbial remains in some of Earth's oldest rocks in Western Australia—a major advance in the fi ...
Delicate wash cycles in washing machines found to release more plastic microfibres than other cycles. New research led by Newcastle University has shown that it is the volume of water used during the wash cycle, rather than the spinning action of the washing machine, which is the key factor in t ...
Darker male giraffes have been found to be more solitary and less social than their lighter-colored counterparts, according to new research from The University of Queensland.
Piranhas and their herbivorous cousins pacus have distinctive teeth used to tear through tough food. A recent paper by Matthew Kolmann, a postdoctoral fellow in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences Department of Biological Sciences, suggests that how these fish lose their teeth—all at once ...
While whales and dolphins spend their entire life in the ocean, these air-breathing mammals actually evolved from terrestrial species. The transition from land to water in the ancestors of modern whales and dolphins about 50 million years ago was accompanied by profound anatomical, physiological ...
Millions of people around the world suffer from malnutrition despite the ready availability of essential nutrients just off their coastlines. Dietary deficiencies in iron, calcium and other micronutrients are responsible for more than a million premature deaths every year. New research published ...