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A Cape Cod science center and one of the world's largest shipping businesses are collaborating on a project to use robotic buoys to protect a vanishing whale from lethal collisions with ships.

Wildlife authorities are trying to determine why large numbers of California brown pelicans are being found sick and dying.

A gene that has been associated with severe learning disabilities in humans has been found to also play a vital role in cells' response to environmental stress, according to a Duke University study appearing May 24 in the journal Cell Reports.

After sustaining seemingly catastrophic hurricane damage, a primordial groundcover vital to sustaining a multitude of coastal lifeforms bounced back to life in a matter of months.

Any animal ascending a mountain experiences a double whammy of impediments: The air gets thinner as it also becomes colder, which is particularly problematic for creatures struggling to keep warm when less oxygen is available. For tiny animals with the…

Using a next generation sequencing analysis to examine human endogenous retrovirus (HERV) integration sites, researchers from Kumamoto University, the National Institute of Genetics (Japan), and the University of Michigan (U.S.) have discovered that these…

It is projected that by the year 2050, the global food supply will need to increase by 50-80% to keep up with the growing population. Researchers all over the world have been working to find ways to sustainably grow food crops to meet this need, and improving…

Chromosomes undergo precise structural changes at a molecular level during the different phases of cell division. These changes occur at a high level of accuracy to prevent genome instability. Genome instability resulting from broken, missing, or rearranged…

Jairo Kenupp Bastos first heard about the insect while visiting Canavieiras on the south coast of Bahia, a state in the Northeast of Brazil. "Local beekeepers told me about a tiny beetle that made holes in a plant called Dalbergia ecastaphyllum [Coinvine],…

To keep order in the tight quarters of the cell nucleus, our DNA is neatly clamped in place around a central disk by H1 linker histone, which helps shepherd DNA into the tidy chromatin fibers that comprise chromosomes. Linker histone, however, is far more than…

Fin whales are the second largest creatures on our planet, surpassed only by blue whales. They can reach a length of around 20 meters—and require up to two metric tons of food per day. Accordingly, they release enormous amounts of nutrients—with…

Standing in the middle of a stretch of land surrounded by dunes and pine forest, Juan Romero examines the cracked ground then stares at the dusty horizon.

How fast is evolution? In adaptive evolution, natural selection causes genetic changes in traits that favor the survival and reproduction of individual organisms.

While Pakistan has managed to confine an outbreak of lumpy skin disease that affects cattle and buffaloes there are fears that cattle fairs ahead of the religious festival Eid-ul-Azha might trigger a second wave.

Consider the humble zebrafish. They produce 200 embryos every 7 days, they're cheap and easy to grow, and their young are small and transparent. But their most important feature—at least if you are a researcher—is that they share a high degree of genetic,…

Biological arms races are commonplace in nature. Cheetahs, for example, have evolved a sleek body form that lends itself to rapid running, enabling them to feast upon similarly speedy gazelles, the fastest of which may evade predation. On the molecular level,…

"Nothing is certain except for death and taxes," said Benjamin Franklin. Of course, he left out another certainty for humankind: sleep. All humans sleep, albeit some better than others. But do all animals sleep, too?

In a study published in Nature Methods, a research team led by Prof. Qu Kun from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has benchmarked 16 spatial and single-cell transcriptomics integration methods for…

Baby season this year launched out of this world with the birth of two new critically endangered red-ruffed lemurs on April 13, 2022. Meet Hubble and Kitt, the newest additions at the Duke Lemur Center.

The membrane-bound form of angiotensin converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) is essential for enabling infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, according to a study published in the journal Cell.

Some male wolf spiders seem to get luckier than others when it comes to courting females. The secret of their courtship? It's complicated, says a new study led by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

DNA "fingerprints" left behind by sea turtles offer scientists a simple, powerful way of tracking the health and whereabouts of these endangered animals, a key step forward in their conservation.

On the list of scientific tools that help us understand health, evolution or the environment, the Trinidadian guppy doesn't often come to mind.

A report by the Agricultural and Food Policy Center, AFPC, at Texas A&M University titled "Economic Impact of Higher Crop and Input Prices on AFPC's Representative Crop Farms" provides insights into the economic impacts of higher crop and major input prices on…

An iconic coral species found in UK waters could expand its range due to climate change, new research shows.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can track the health of coral reefs by learning the "song of the reef", new research shows.

Reducing levels of the nutrient phosphorus to control harmful algal blooms in places like Lake Erie is actually advantageous to toxic cyanobacteria strains, which can lead to an increase in toxins in the water, according to a new modeling study.

You don't have to be an engineer to know that water and electronics don't mix. But if you want to use a sensing circuit to study small-scale features in a community of cells, the electronics must find a way to accommodate the cell's aqueous environment. The…

CRISPR has ushered in the era of genomic medicine. A line of powerful tools has been developed from the popular CRISPR-Cas9 to cure genetic diseases. However, there is a last-mile problem—these tools need to be effectively delivered into every cell of the…

The iconic Red List of Threatened Species, published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), identifies species at risk of extinction. A study in PLOS Biology publishing May 26 by Gabriel Henrique de Oliveira Caetano at Ben-Gurion…