How duplicated genomes helped grasses diversify and thrive
Grasses cover about 40% of the Earth's land surface, thriving in a multitude of environments. The evolutionary success of this plant family, which includes rice, maize, wheat and bamboo, likely results from a history of whole-genome duplications, acc.....»»
Ants learned to farm fungi during a mass extinction
Ants learned to work with fungi back in a world where only fungi could thrive. We tend to think of agriculture as a human innovation. But insects beat us to it by millions of year.....»»
Community sports need provincial "assist" to thrive, says report
Whether it's a children's soccer league run by parent volunteers or an adult hockey team whose players spend as much time socializing as shooting pucks, amateur sports play a vital role in enhancing community engagement and public health......»»
Enveil enables organizations to securely train machine learning models
Enveil announced the expansion of the core technologies supported by its ZeroReveal Machine Learning product, an enhancement that will further broaden and diversify the range of customer-driven use cases the solution can address. By allowing customer.....»»
Exploring the role of hydrogen sulfide in the expression of iron uptake genes in E. coli
Antibiotic resistance and oxidative stress response are important biological mechanisms that help bacteria thrive, especially pathogenic bacteria like Escherichia coli. Hydrogen sulfide (H2S), a chemical messenger molecule, regulates several intracel.....»»
Hummingbirds thrive on an extreme lifestyle. Here’s how.
Nightly suspended animation, sugary diet, backwards flight, and long migrations help. Enlarge / Hummingbirds—like this golden-tailed sapphire from South America—draw the eye with their bright colors and busy, hovering flight......»»
How coral and sediments helped to reconstruct 2.6 million years of climate history
Today's climate change is man-made. The consensus in the climate science community is unequivocal, but in order to determine just how exceptional current climate change is, we have had to contextualize the present on a much longer time scale. To do t.....»»
Restoring nature, "adaptation" helped limit Storm Boris impact
The restoration of a creek in Vienna reduced the impact of flooding caused by Storm Boris, authorities say, one of many projects experts believe helped central Europe endure the deluge better than in previous years......»»
Researchers decode oldest human DNA from South Africa to date
Researchers have reconstructed the oldest human genomes ever found in South Africa from two people who lived around 10,000 years ago, allowing a better understanding of how the region was populated, an author of the study said Sunday......»»
A new genetic analysis of animals in the Wuhan market in 2019 may help find COVID-19"s origin
Scientists searching for the origins of COVID-19 have zeroed in on a short list of animals that possibly helped spread it to people, an effort they hope could allow them to trace the outbreak back to its source......»»
How a doubling of sentence lengths helped pack England"s prisons to the rafters
Around 1,750 prisoners in England and Wales were recently released early, the first part of the government's plan to solve the prison overcrowding crisis......»»
Life might thrive on the surface of Earth for an extra billion years
The sun is midway through its life of fusion. It's about 5 billion years old, and though its life is far from over, it will undergo some pronounced changes as it ages. Over the next billion years, the sun will continue to brighten......»»
Scientists from 33 European countries join forces to generate reference genomes for the continent"s biological diversity
In a new publication, the European Reference Genome Atlas (ERGA) announces the success of its pilot project. This initiative assembled a large collaborative network of scientists and institutions across 33 countries to produce high-quality reference.....»»
Mice made transparent with a dye used in Doritos
Matching refractive indexes lets some wavelengths pass cleanly through the skin. Enlarge / Zihao Ou, who helped develop this solution, holds a tube of it. One key challenge in medical imaging is to look past skin and ot.....»»
Dating apps haven’t helped us find better partners, suggests research
You’d think that dating apps would help people find better partners, given that they allow daters to expand their dating pool beyond the people they meet organically, but new research suggests that isn’t the case. The research even suggests th.....»»
How Olmec elite helped legitimize their political power through art
In an article recently published in Latin American Antiquity, Dr. Jill Mollenhauer argues that the Gulf Lowland Olmec, one of Mesoamerica's earliest major civilizations, sometimes incorporated aesthetic and ritual practices associated with their rock.....»»
AI Has Helped Shein Become Fast Fashion’s Biggest Polluter
The company nearly doubled its emissions in 2023, making it the worst actor in a notoriously unsustainable industry......»»
Soil pH drives microbial community composition: Study shows how bacteria work together to thrive in difficult conditions
Though a founding concept of ecology suggests that the physical environment determines where organisms can survive, modern scientists have suspected there is more to the story of how microbial communities form in the soil......»»
Old Easter Island genomes show no sign of a population collapse
Native American DNA in the genomes dates to roughly when Rapa Nui was settled. Enlarge (credit: Jarcosa) Rapa Nui, often referred to as Easter Island, is one of the most remote populated islands in the world. It's so dis.....»»
Multiple ways to evolve tiny knee bone could have helped humans walk upright
The evolution of bones in primates' knees could have implications for how humans evolved to walk upright, a new study has found......»»
With AI, extreme microbe reveals how life"s building blocks adapt to high pressure
An assist from a Google Artificial Intelligence tool has helped scientists discover how the proteins of a heat-loving microbe respond to the crushing conditions of the planet's deepest ocean trenches, offering new insights into how these building blo.....»»