Making wheat more resilient to climate change without compromising yields has become an urgent priority for the agricultural sector. Now, a study led by a research team from the University of Barcelona and the Agrotecnio research center has identified an innovative way to address this challenge: combining advanced technology and artificial intelligence to select the best varieties of this crop. [...]
Over the past few decades, a collaboration of St. Louis regional groups have partnered to be good stewards of Forest Park, one of the largest urban parks and wildlife areas in the country. Organizations such as Forest Park Forever have restored habitat, while scientists with the Saint Louis Zoo have partnered with conservation groups and universities, including WashU, to monitor wildlife populations. [...]
When Jasper Baur was a freshman at New York's Binghamton University, his interests centered on earth sciences. Then he got involved in a seemingly unrelated pursuit: harnessing drone-mounted geophysical instruments to aid in the slow, dangerous work of detecting land mines. [...]
Nicotine, a potent insecticidal alkaloid unique to the nightshade family, has been employed in agriculture as a pesticide since 1690. It also has therapeutic potential for neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and depression. Despite its profound influence on human history, agriculture, and plant evolution, however, the final steps of nicotine biosynthesis have remained unclear until now. [...]
We associate nests with shelter, warmth, and a safe retreat—and usually picture a bird's nest made out of twigs, grass and feathers. Yet many other animals take advantage of such refuges, with nests being built by a diversity of species ranging from termites to great apes, which impress with their hugely varied forms and the wide array of materials used to construct them. [...]
Elements essential to life, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, were "delivered" to Earth and the moon during the early stages of the solar system via asteroids and comets impacting their surfaces. These exogenous materials may have provided the chemical building blocks necessary for the origin and early evolution of life on Earth. But extensive geological activity and biological processes on Earth have largely erased the direct records of these early inputs on our planet. [...]
Crystals, bacterial colonies, flame fronts: the growth of surfaces was first described in the 1980s by the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang equation. Since then, it has been regarded as a fundamental model in physics, with implications for mathematics, biology, and computer science. [...]
U.S. cities are rapidly becoming urban heat islands, where these cities are significantly warmer than their surrounding area. Vast expanses of asphalt and concrete trap heat, while large, densely packed buildings disrupt wind flow and intensify the effect. But beyond parking lots and skyscrapers, recent research points to highways as another cause behind America's urban heat islands. [...]
On the shores of the west coast of Australia lies a window to our past: the stromatolites and microbial mats of Gathaagudu (Shark Bay). [...]
The halomethane compound bromoform (CHBr3) has devastating effects on the ozone layer. In the upper layers of the atmosphere, bromoform reacts with UV radiation, releasing bromine molecules which destroy ozone molecules. This reaction, however, has long puzzled scientists; the molecules involved seem to wander relative to each other in a way that energetically does not make sense. Scientists at European XFEL have now revealed structural evidence for this roaming mechanism for the first time, establishing it as a universal characteristic of photochemical reactions. [...]
There are many poorly understood links in the food web, often referred to as trophic relationships. Out in East Antarctica, a previously unconfirmed link between sea snails and Adélie penguins might reveal more than meets the eye for the Southern Ocean ecosystem. [...]
Iron and oxygen bind together throughout the body. Most famously, iron binds dioxygen, or two oxygens paired with each other, in hemoglobin that transports oxygen through blood. But iron-oxo compounds, as they're called, are found in many other places throughout the body. For example, the highly reactive iron-oxo is used in liver enzymes that metabolize drugs. [...]
After months of relentlessly miserable weather for most of the UK, spring brings renewed enthusiasm for spending time outdoors hiking, wild swimming, paddling, or on walks. [...]
Observations conducted with the Subaru Telescope and its first-generation wide-field camera, Suprime-Cam, have revealed new insights into the relationship between the color and size of Jupiter Trojan asteroids. [...]
We thought it was evolution, but an experiment with pencils shows that tips like teeth and thorns may owe their rounded shape to mechanical wear. Most of us have been stung by a bee, bitten by an animal, or scratched by a thorny bush. But very few of us have probably taken a close look at nature's painful, pointed tips. [...]
What if the Trojan horse had been pulled to pieces, revealing the ruse and fending off the invasion, just as it entered the gates of Troy? That's an apt description of a newly characterized bacterial defense system that chops up foreign DNA. Bacteria and the viruses that infect them, bacteriophages—phages for short—are ceaselessly at odds, with bacteria developing methods to protect themselves against phages that are constantly striving to overcome those safeguards. [...]
Along the southern coastline, researchers dive deep to collect seaweed from kelp forests and rocky platforms, taking small samples and the location of each sample. Back in the lab, the specimens are preserved—some dried, others kept alive—so they can be studied, cultured and sequenced. [...]
Tropical trees are better neighbors than trees in temperate forests, according to a study published in the journal Nature by researchers from 29 different institutions including the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and the ForestGEO global network of forest monitoring sites. [...]
A study published in Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa sheds new light on the westward spread of pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) agriculture in prehistoric West Africa. A recent survey documented its earliest known occurrence in the Lac de Guiers basin of Northern Senegal, around AD 200, coinciding with increasing aridification, which may have driven the expansion of dryland farming communities westward. [...]
Rapid ocean warming is likely to make tropical cyclone rainfall more intense and longer lasting, increasing flood risks in parts of the North Atlantic region. A new study led by Newcastle University using satellite data shows that tropical cyclones and their post-tropical cyclone counterparts are responding quite differently to surface warming. The findings reveal that during the tropical cyclone phase, warmer and more humid conditions are causing storm slowdown and strongly increasing rainfall intensity. [...]
Thirty-four years after Cornell University scientists first conceived it, the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) now rises above the Atacama Desert, near the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile. FYST will help answer some of the most important questions in astronomy, including how the universe works, the nature of dark energy and dark matter, how galaxies form and evolve and what happened in those mysterious first moments after the Big Bang. [...]
Researchers from the Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy have flipped a long-held assumption in optics, showing that deliberately introducing controlled disorder into ultra-thin optical devices can dramatically increase their power and versatility, without making them bigger or more complex. [...]
When we watch videos or ask AI questions, enormous amounts of data are constantly moving inside computers. In particular, data centers that support AI must process and transfer vast amounts of data at very high speeds. However, current computers have a fundamental limitation: the place where calculations are performed and the place where data is stored are physically separated. [...]
Roman painters commissioned at the end of the 1st century to decorate the walls of the Domus of Salvius in present-day Cartagena could hardly have imagined that their technical expertise would still attract attention twenty centuries later. Analysis of wall paintings from one of the house's rooms—among the best preserved in ancient Carthago Nova—shows that these craftsmen possessed a sophisticated understanding of the materials used to produce pigments, as well as the effects achieved through combining them. In particular, researchers identified an advanced "recipe" that enabled them to reduce costs while ensuring the durability of the paint. This method relied on a mixture of pigments, including one of the most valued minerals of the time: costly cinnabar, often referred to as "red gold." [...]
As the Orion spacecraft hurtles home, friction caused by reentry into Earth's atmosphere will drastically decrease its speed from a potential 25,000 miles per hour (40,000 kilometers per hour). [...]
Cases of Borna disease virus 1 (BoDV-1) are extremely rare in humans, but in those who develop disease, the outcome is severe, almost always resulting in fatal encephalitis or inflammation in the brain. This zoonotic virus belongs to the order Mononegavirales, which includes the lethal viruses responsible for Ebola virus disease, measles, and rabies. The nucleoprotein-RNA complex in these viruses protects its genomic RNA and supports viral RNA synthesis, so understanding the structure of this complex is essential to targeting viral replication. Structural characterization has been completed for several mononegavirus families that more commonly infect humans, but detailed information for the family Bornaviridae has not been sufficiently explored. [...]
Intracellular transport is a vital process that allows cells to move proteins and other molecules to specific locations. This process is especially important in neurons, which have highly polarized structures with long extensions such as axons and dendrites. For neurons to function properly, proteins must be transported accurately to specific regions, such as the axon initial segment (AIS), a specialized site for initiating electrical signals. [...]
From the Wright brothers' first flight to the speedy development of COVID-19 vaccines, collaboration has been key to innovation. Paradoxically, even competitors can benefit from collaboration—when they hold different pieces of the same puzzle. [...]
Most polychaete species spend their lives in burrows in the seabed. However, adult individuals of two species, Alitta succinea and Platynereis dumerilii, leave their burrows to spawn during warm summer nights around the full moon. [...]
Millions of students nationwide use text-supplemented audiobooks, learning tools that are thought to help those who struggle with reading keep up in the classroom. A new study by scientists at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research finds that many students do benefit from audiobooks, gaining new vocabulary through the stories they hear. But study participants learned significantly more when audiobooks were paired with explicit one-on-one instruction—and this was especially true for students who were poor readers. [...]