Mom or not, caring for babies changes the brain
Freeman Hrabowski Scholar Bianca Jones Marlin studies how caregiving takes shape in the brain and how some biological adaptations are passed to the next generation.
Freeman Hrabowski Scholar Bianca Jones Marlin studies how caregiving takes shape in the brain and how some biological adaptations are passed to the next generation.
Fertilization is often imagined as a frantic race, with millions of sperm competing for a single prize. But new research by a team of evolutionary biologists from Syracuse University, the University of Siena in Italy and the University of Szeged in Hungary reveals a more surprising reality, where success can depend less on competition and more on cooperation.
New York University researchers have pinpointed the molecular players responsible for plants "feeling full" once they've taken up enough nitrogen—a finding that could help scientists develop plants that absorb more nitrogen from the soil and allow farmers to reduce environmentally and economically costly fertilizer applications.
Approximately 40% of insect species worldwide are thought to be in decline and under threat of extinction. Among the key causes are habitat loss, pollution and climate change. Another threat is artificial light from sources like streetlights and security lamps. In new research published in the journal Biological Conservation, scientists say a simple change in artificial lighting could help reduce this particular threat.
The small mountain streams that feed many of the West's rivers may face a much drier future. A new study led by NAU researchers found that groundwater-fed streamflow, known as base flow, has been steadily declining across headwater watersheds in the western United States since 1950 and could decrease by 45% to 65% by the end of this century if current climate trends continue.
Researchers in the lab of Sam Peng, the Pfizer Inc.–Gerald Laubach Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemistry at MIT and a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, have developed a super-resolution imaging technology. It allows scientists to visualize molecular structures with angstrom-level localization precision—three orders of magnitude beyond the nanometer-scale limits of standard fluorescent dyes—while simplifying the imaging process.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is defined as the ability of disease-causing microorganisms to withstand treatments like antibiotics.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers obtained high-contrast coronagraphic images of the protoplanetary disk around the young, nearby star TW Hydrae. Results of the observational campaign, published July 27 on the preprint server arXiv, shed more light on the nature of this disk.
The left-right asymmetry of South African butterfly lilies (genus Wachendorfia) has been regarded as a classic evolutionary puzzle for more than a century. Due to the mirror-image arrangement of the floral parts, the plants achieve efficient cross-pollination. The molecular basis of this arrangement has now been uncovered by an international team led by the University of Potsdam.
Nitrogen gas is abundant in Earth's atmosphere, but most living organisms can't readily use it. Only a subset of microbes with enzymes known as nitrogenases can break nitrogen gas apart and convert it into ammonia.