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French authorities were preparing Saturday to give vitamins to a beluga whale that swam way up the Seine river, as they raced to save the malnourished creature, which has so far refused food.

A Pakistan zoo is auctioning off a dozen lions to private collectors next week to free up space for a pride that won't stop growing.

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have found a way to reduce the amount of nitrogen fertilizers needed to grow cereal crops. The discovery could save farmers in the United States billions of dollars annually in fertilizer costs while also…

Did the 12th century B.C.E.—a time when humans were forging great empires and developing new forms of written text—coincide with an evolutionary reduction in brain size? Think again, says a UNLV-led team of researchers who refute a hypothesis that's…

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health have developed a three-dimensional structure that allows them to see how and where disease mutations on the twinkle protein can lead to mitochondrial diseases. The protein is involved in helping cells use…

DNA-based information is a new interdisciplinary field linking information technology and biotechnology. The field hopes to meet the enormous need for long-term data storage by using DNA as an information storage medium. Despite DNA's promise of strong…

A systematic review of 301 academic articles on "cultural ecosystem services" has enabled researchers to identify how these nonmaterial contributions from nature are linked to and significantly affect human well-being. They identified 227 unique pathways…

A common weed harbors important clues about how to create drought resistant crops in a world beset by climate change.

In the beginning, there was boredom. Following the emergence of cellular life on earth, some 3.5 billion years ago, simple cells lacking a nucleus and other detailed internal structure dominated the planet. Matters would remain largely unchanged in terms of…

In recent work published in the journal Horticulture Research, researchers from Northeast Agricultural University and Huazhong Agricultural University characterized a negative regulator of late blight resistance in potato.

Researchers at Michigan State University have shown that locusts can not only "smell" the difference between cancer cells and healthy cells, but they can also distinguish between different cancer cell lines. 

We have recently witnessed the stunning images of distant galaxies revealed by the James Webb telescope, which were previously visible only as blurry spots. Washington University in St. Louis researchers have developed a novel method for visualizing the…

The MikroIker team of the UPV/EHU's Department of Immunology, Microbiology and Parasitology has conducted a study into the prevalence and characterization of bacteria of the Arcobacter genus using a large number of samples of different foods (seafood,…

A study published recently in Nature Ecology and Evolution has unveiled some of the key processes in marine microbial evolution. According to the study, led by the Uppsala University (Sweden) and with the participation of the Institut de Ciències del Mar…

Stem cell scientists say they have created "synthetic embryos" without using sperm, eggs or fertilization for the first time, but the prospect of using such a technique to grow human organs for transplantation remains distant.

The growing trend of people feeding wild animals poses a serious risk to the well-being of humans and wildlife as new research from University College Dublin finds these feeding interactions could be driving the artificial selection of harassment behavior in…

Experts at the forefront of efforts to restore the U.K.'s coastal seagrass meadows say the remarkable plant's contribution to the most important to-do list in the history of humankind should be reassessed.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID, originated from bats and then, probably after passing through an intermediary host, gained the ability to infect humans.

In what's reported as a world-first achievement, biologists have grown mouse embryo models in the lab without the need for fertilized eggs, embryos, or even a mouse—using only stem cells and a special incubator.

Animals in the wild may not have an annual planner to keep track of the year, but they nonetheless manage to keep to a strict calendar—for example knowing just what time of the year to breed and when to hibernate. Research into the circadian clocks that…

A new study analyzes human impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in 72 lakes distributed across four large neotropical wetlands of Brazil—Amazon, Araguaia, Pantanal and Paraná. The research spans a 3.7million km gradient of human activities in…

All baby birds have a moment prior to hatching when their hip bone is a tiny replica of a dinosaur's pelvis.

As the risk of extinction for crocodilians grows, these well known species are not the only thing we stand to lose. New research in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology highlights the unique roles these reptiles fulfill in their…

Psychologists from Durham University, UK have found in their study that bonobos produce a variety of signals including "baby-like" signals to strategically display distress when they are attacked by other bonobos.

Grasslands' biodiversity and resilience to disturbances such as fire, heat and drought is the result of a slow process over hundreds of years, like that of old growth forests, finds new CU Boulder-led research.

Fly-swatting season is here. No sooner will you place your fresh strawberries on the kitchen counter than will the first fruit fly arrive. It won't take long for a platoon of Drosophila buddies to be hovering about the spoils.

Researchers Albert Cairó and Karel Riha of the Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC) and their colleagues have discovered a previously unknown mechanism that is responsible for reprogramming gene expression in plants during the transition period…

Tropical coastal ecosystems are among the most biodiverse areas on Earth. They're also on the front lines of effects caused by human activity. That's why it's becoming increasingly important, especially as human populations increase, to manage the impacts of…

New genetic analyses of wild baboons in southern Kenya reveals that most of them carry traces of hybridization in their DNA. As a result of interbreeding, about a third of their genetic makeup consists of genes from another, closely-related species.

Scientists have constructed the most complete and detailed single-cell map of embryo development in any animal to date, using the fruit fly as a model organism.