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For trees, carbs are key to surviving insect defoliation, study finds
Research reveals that a tree’s carbohydrate reserves are crucial to surviving an onslaught of hungry caterpillars. The biology of trees makes them resilient to even the most severe stressors. «Oak trees are planners, in a way,» says Meghan Blumstein, NSF Post-doctoral Research Fellow at MIT and a co-author of the study. «Some of the food…
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Science takes guesswork out of cheese production and reduces waste
New research allows cheese quality to be checked much earlier and more precisely in the process, giving manufacturers a better chance to react to issues with the ripening process. It’s part of why cheese is so complex and expensive to make — a factory could invest lots of time and money into what they think…
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Chromosomal speciation in wild house mice
A new look into the genomes of natural populations of the common house mice by a team of researchers suggests that large-scale chromosomal rearrangements play an important role in speciation. Alterations to chromosomes are considered important in speciation (the process by which new species are formed). This is because several chromosomal rearrangements can make the…
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Genetic analysis system yields new insights into bacterial pneumonia
A team of infectious disease researchers has developed a new method to identify virulence genes in Streptococcus pneumoniae, the leading cause of bacterial pneumonia. Using this technique in a mouse model of pneumonia, they were able to gain new insights into the progression of the disease and its interaction with the flu virus. «Bacterial pneumonia…
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Owl wing design reduces aircraft, wind turbine noise pollution
Researchers used the characteristics of owl wings to inform airfoil design and significantly reduce trailing-edge noise. The team used noise calculation and analysis software to conduct a series of detailed theoretical studies of simplified airfoils with characteristics reminiscent of owl wings. They applied their findings to suppress the noise of rotating machinery. Improving the flow…
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Indigenous mortality following Spanish colonization did not always lead to forest regrowth, study finds
New research shows that disruptions to Indigenous land management following Iberian colonization did not always result in widespread forest regrowth in the Americas and Asia-Pacific, as has been recently argued. A new study, published now in Nature Ecology and Evolution, draws on pollen records from tropical regions formerly claimed by the Spanish Empire in both…
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Hurricanes drive the evolution of more aggressive spiders
Researchers who rush in after storms to study the behavior of spiders have found that extreme weather events such as tropical cyclones may have an evolutionary impact on populations living in storm-prone regions, where aggressive spiders have the best odds of survival. Raging winds can demolish trees, defoliate entire canopies and scatter debris across forest…
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Looking at factors that accelerate mass extinction in the fossil record as climate changes
The Late Devonian mass extinction (roughly 372 million years ago) was one of five mass extinctions in Earth’s history, with roughly 75% of all species disappearing over its course. It happened in two ‘pulses,’ spaced about 800,000 years apart, with most of the extinctions happening in the second pulse. However, for one group of animals…
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The secret life of Tasmanian devils is hiding in their whiskers
Researchers have mapped the timescale of the Tasmanian devils’ whiskers, showing that their whiskers can capture seasonal dietary changes over at least nine months and potentially up to a year. The long, wiry whiskers on these stocky marsupials hold chemical imprints from food they’ve eaten in the past — records that can help tell broader…
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Researchers explore ways to make hatchery steelhead more like wild fish
Hatchery-raised steelhead trout have offspring that are good at gaining size under hatchery conditions but don’t survive as well in streams as steelhead whose parents are wild fish, new research shows. The results, published in PLOS ONE, suggest that it may be possible to change rearing methods to produce hatchery fish that are more like…