Protecting and expanding suitable habitats for wildlife is key to the conservation of endangered species, but owing to climate and land use change the ideal habitats of today may not be fitting in 30 or 50 years. An international team of scientists therefore predicted range shifts of Asian elephants in India and Nepal using species…
Temnothorax americanus is a slavemaking ant found in northeastern America. These tiny social insects neither rear their offspring nor search for food themselves. Instead, they raid nests of another ant species, Temnothorax longispinosus, kidnap their larvae and pupae to bring these back to their own nest. Once these have reached adulthood, the abducted ants must…
Scientists at the University of Bath have identified how a mutant gene in fish is involved in controlling stem cells. A new study from the group of Professor Robert Kelsh in the Department of Biology & Biochemistry looks at how a novel group of stem cells are controlled by mutations in a gene called parade.…
The circulation of the dengue virus for the past sixty years in South-East Asia is relatively well known. For Zika, the situation is much less clear. In an attempt to shed light on Zika circulation, scientists from the Institut Pasteur and the CNRS, in collaboration with US teams and the Thai National Institute of Health,…
Silicate glass has many applications, including the use as a nuclear waste form to immobilize radioactive elements from spent fuel. However, it has one disadvantage — it corrodes when it comes into contact with aqueous solutions. Scientists at the University of Bonn were able to observe in detail which processes take place. The results have…
The spread of antimicrobial resistance in hospitals can be limited by sanitation methods that remodulate the hospital microbiota, leading to lower antimicrobial consumption and costs, according to a paper in Infection and Drug Resistance co-authored by two Bocconi University scholars (for the part related to costs) with University of Ferrara and colleagues from University of…
Many countries are engaged in a vast illegal and unrecorded international trade in seahorses, one that circumvents global regulations, according to new UBC study that has implications for many other animal species. The United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) restricts exports of seahorses to those that…
As the world population swells, the inequitable distribution of food around the globe is prompting profound moral questions. Is the unequal distribution of food in rich and poor countries, for instance, merely a consequence of geography, with rich countries having more fertile lands? Or are food shortages in some countries a function of socio-economics and…
Polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene are the most abundant microplastics in the Mediterranean coastal waters, according to a new study published by the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin -by the experts Miquel Canals, William P. de Haan, and Anna Sànchez-Vidal, from the Consolidated Research Group on Marine Geosciences of the Faculty of Earth Sciences of the University…
Every bit of information about a person’s health — their exposure to chemicals, their inherited risks, their current illnesses — lies within their molecules. That’s a diverse array of substances that amounts to a number so long, it doesn’t have a name: 1 with 50 zeros after it. A team of Vanderbilt University chemists started…