What helps plants cope better with drought? With heat waves and periods of extreme drought becoming increasingly common worldwide, the need for drought-tolerant plants is increasingly urgent. With the help of bacteria, plants can unlock traits that help them cope with drought, securing biodiversity and food safety.
Last spring, UC Berkeley researcher Anna Powell sat in on a Zoom call as a number of Bay Area child care center leaders discussed, with sympathy and frustration, the difficult position their businesses were in.
Antarctica is one of the driest, coldest places on Earth. Very little life survives its extremes. In the soils scattered around the frozen ice sheets, however, communities of microbes do survive. And one of the keys to their success is a surprisingly communal strategy.
More than 80 countries face chronic drought, yet only a third have systems in place to act before a drought arrives rather than after. The gap is costly. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, every $1 invested in anticipatory action can save up to $7 in averted losses, while also helping protect lives and livelihoods before crisis conditions take hold. Acting early works. So why don't more countries do it?
A new study has reconciled a long-standing paradox in the South Asian summer monsoon cycle. Climate scientists have discovered why geological records from land and sea have told opposite stories about monsoons throughout history and found that rising temperatures over Southern Africa reduce upwelling in the Arabian Sea, which could damage marine productivity and fisheries. The work is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's 16-year rule ended in the spring, when voters replaced him with Péter Magyar, who has pledged to undo Orbán-led initiatives that, in the eyes of critics, isolated and politicized science.
Dr. Christopher Moore, a research fellow and former Ph.D. researcher in hidden and lost heritage at Kent, combined archive records with architectural evidence to link the 1883–84 extension to Sandown Castle, one of Henry VIII's 16th-century coastal forts. Supported by the university and carried out with the cooperation of English Heritage, the research offers fresh insight into the history of Dover Castle and the story of one of England's lost Tudor fortresses.
The future of Maine's lobster industry may depend on a creature the size of a sesame seed. Researchers at the University of Maine have discovered that planktonic baby lobsters, or larvae, preferentially feed on Calanus finmarchicus, a tiny, calorie-rich zooplankton species, during one of the most vulnerable stages of their lives. Their new study upholds a theory advanced by scientists in the past decade that may be relevant to recent declines in Maine's lobster harvest.
Forest and land fires across Indonesia have spiked once again. News and social media in the country are flooded with images of thick plumes of smoke from Kalimantan (or Borneo)—the world's third-largest island—that are choking residential areas and even drifting into neighboring countries.
On Aug. 15, the CTAO LST Collaboration and the MAGIC Collaboration released findings from observations of OP 313, the most distant very-high-energy blazar ever recorded. The paper, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, presents in-depth observations conducted with the prototype Large-Sized Telescope (LST-1) and the MAGIC telescopes at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma, Spain.
