PHYSorg · Page 23

The key to understanding how climate change affects local biodiversity might lie with the young, scientists have recently discovered.

Lichens on stone, those "still explosions" as the great American poet Elizabeth Bishop named them, remain unseen to most, which is remarkable when you consider how commonplace they are. It seems these ecologically and culturally significant whatever-they-are…

A female gray wolf was reported dead in northwest Colorado this week, becoming at least the seventh of the state's reintroduced wolves to die.

Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and partner institutions, including the Brookfield Zoo Chicago's Sarasota Dolphin Research Program (SDRP), are the winners of the inaugural Coller Dolittle Challenge for their work in identifying…

A team of Australian researchers has discovered 71 new native bee species belonging to the resin pot bees, or Megachile (Austrochile), which are unique to Australia and present in every state and territory except Tasmania.

With one foot braced on the helicopter's landing skid, a veterinarian lifted his air rifle, took aim and fired a tranquilizer dart at a polar bear.

Since the inhabitants of Jemna in southern Tunisia wrested control of their 100-year-old palm grove from the state during the 2011 Revolution, residents say their lives have radically improved.

With its golden sand and blue waters, the beachfront in central Israel looks much like any other stretch of Mediterranean coast, but a closer look reveals something unusual peeking through the rippling surf: black shark fins.

Corals everywhere on the planet live in harmony with microscopic organisms. Many corals get their vivid colors from microscopic algae which lives inside the corals' tissue and provides the coral with food. Even in the water surrounding coral reefs, there is a…

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new way to identify genetic changes that help tiny oxygen-producing microbes survive in extreme environments. The findings outline a new experimental approach…

Before it gets to your table in a steaming dish, rice has to go through the mill. More specifically, the unprocessed rice kernels that are encased in an inedible hull must undergo milling to reveal the white rice grain.

In the natural world—where predators pounce, prey flee, and group members feed and sleep in solidarity—animal behavior is glorious in its variety. Now, new research suggests there may be an underlying architecture that orders the movements of animals as…

Taste, pain, or response to stress—nearly all essential functions in the human body are regulated by molecular switches called G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). Researchers at the University of Basel have uncovered the fundamental mechanism for how such a…

In an article published in Nature Communications, researchers from Uppsala Antibiotic Center, Uppsala University and SciLifeLab describe a fundamental mechanism of antibiotic resistance. What happens in a bacterium that is resistant to the antibiotic fusidic…

Prostaglandin E2 (PGE2), a bioactive lipid derived from arachidonic acid, mediates a broad range of physiological processes through four G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) subtypes: EP1–EP4. While the high-resolution structures of EP2, EP3 and EP4 have been…

An international team of scientists have unlocked a key piece of Earth's evolutionary puzzle by decoding the structure of a light-harvesting "nanodevice" in one of the planet's most ancient lineages of cyanobacteria.

In work from the University of Warwick, researchers have found that wild orangutans vocalize with a layered complexity previously thought to be unique to human communication, suggesting a much older evolutionary origin.

Every living creature on Earth needs to protect itself from things that would do it harm. Bacteria are no different. And despite their relative simplicity, they deploy remarkably savvy defensive strategies against viral invaders. The most well-known is…

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine have discovered how a parasite that causes malaria when transmitted through a mosquito bite can hide from the body's immune system, sometimes for years. It turns out that the parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, can shut down…

Plants are sprouting from the ground earlier and earlier once the snow has disappeared. This is now happening on average six days earlier than 25 years ago, according to a newly published study by SLF researcher Michael Zehnder and colleagues.