UC Berkeley Finally Scores a Win With Two CRISPR Patents
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) just decided to grant not one, but two new CRISPR patents to UC Berkeley, home of biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who many consider the creat...
The Alps are home to more than 3,000 lichens
Nevertheless, while the Alps are one of the best studied parts of the world in terms of their biogeography, no overview of the Alpine lichens had been provided up until recently, whe...
The 6 most pressing environmental issues—and what you can do to help solve them
Continue reading below Our Featured Videos Image via Shutterstock CLIMATE CHANGE While 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is occurring and greenhouse gas e...
Organic insect deterrent for agriculture: Biodegradable crop protection products without risks or side effects
Traditional insecticides are killers: they not only kill pests, they also endanger bees and other beneficial insects, as well as affecting biodiversity in soils, lakes, rivers and se...
New type of photosynthesis discovered
As scientists have now discovered, it also occurs in a cupboard fitted with infrared LEDs in Imperial College London. The new research shows that instead chlorophyll-f plays the key ...
New robots set to transform farming
Use of robots in precision farming has the potential not only to increase yield, but also to reduce the reliance on fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides through selectively sprayin...
Minimalist biostructures designed to create nanomaterials
Credit: IBB-UAB Researchers of the Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine (IBB-UAB) have generated four peptides, molecules smaller than proteins, capable of self-assembling in ...
International Biodiversity Day 2018: tracking new species discovered in India
1/9 Nasikabatrachus bhupathi inhabits the eastern slopes of the Western Ghats, near the Srivilliputhur Grizzled Giant Squirrel Wildlife Sanctuary in Tamil Nadu. The discovery is sig...
Human and artificial intelligence join forces to study complexity of the brain
A team of scientists lead by prof. Stein Aerts (VIB-KU Leuven) is the first to map the gene expression of each individual brain cell during aging, though they started small: with the...
How trees coexist—new findings from biodiversity research
Tree diversity experiment BEF-China, September 2016. Credit: Goddert von Oheimb For a decade, researchers explore how tree species diversity affects the coexistence of trees and the...
Evolution of China’s flowering plants shows East-West divide between old, new lineages
In a study led by Li-Min Lu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, researchers produced the first dated phylogeny - a family tree of organisms showing when new species appeared - for al...
EU approves complete ban on bee-killing insecticides
In a monumental decision that has been years in the making, all member nations of the European Union have approved a total ban of neonicotinoids, the most widely used insecticide in ...
Estimating species loss from habitat clearing
How many species are lost when a forest is cleared? This formula can also be used to calculate how many species are lost when a habitat area shrinks. But Arrhenius’ formula assumes t...
Earth BioGenome project to sequence all life
In an effort to protect and preserve the Earth’s biodiversity and kick-start an inclusive bio-economy, the World Economic Forum today announced a landmark partnership between the Ear...
DNA analysis reveals there are no wild horses left in the world
Researchers are examining the DNA of horses – and what they’ve discovered upends everything we thought we knew. Continue reading below Our Featured Videos Przewalski’s horses, thoug...
DIY brings high throughput to continuous cell culturing
A lot of times, antibiotic resistance shows up when you administer the drug continuously. Where do you see it not evolve? The group struggled to find code that could report, record a...
Breakthrough method predicts resistance to antibiotics under development
Given the ever-increasing threat of antibiotic resistance, European researchers have developed a method to rapidly test new antibiotic candidates for their potential to be hit by eme...
A theory of physics explains the fragmentation of tropical forests
They found that forest fragmentation on all three continents is close to a critical point beyond which the fragment number will strongly increase. The fragment size distribution foll...
A new experiment to understand dark matter
The two arrows indicate the direction of the attractive forces, towards the standard matter—stars, gas, etc. More recently, the satellite experiment MICROSCOPE managed to confirm the...
Zero gravity plant growth experiments delivered to space station
His lab will grow identical seedlings on Earth during the month-long experiment to compare their growth with and without gravity. In another first for Gilroy’s team, astronauts will ...
Why doesn’t Venus have a magnetosphere?
According to the most widely-accepted models of planet formation, terrestrial planets are not formed in a single stage, but from a series of accretion events characterized by collisi...
What Is Gravity Made Of?
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Voyager 1 Just Fired Its Thrusters for the First Time in 37 Years
The Voyager team had noticed diminishing returns on these thrusters since 2014, with the thrusters needing to fire up more often to give off the same amount of energy. They also hadn...
Virgin Hyperloop One’s System Just Broke Elon Musk’s Speed Record
Hyperloop Speed Record On December 18, Virgin Hyperloop One announced the completion of third phase testing on the DevLoop, the world’s first full-scale hyperloop test site. By comb...
Using magnets to control chemical reactions that target release of medicines inside the body
Each of the packets was then loaded with either an enzyme or a substrate meant to react with the enzyme, and, of course, the drug to be released. When the packets made their way to a...