Imagine there are arrows that are lethal when fired on your enemies yet harmless if they fall on your friends. It's easy to see how these would be an amazing advantage in warfare, if they were real. However, something just ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Apr 7, 2021
0
1511
A team of researchers from the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) has discovered a distinct group of bacteria that may help fungi and plants acquire soil nutrients. The findings could point the way to cost-effective and eco-friendly ...
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 2, 2021
1
6594
Imagine that you need to travel, but you don't have a car and you're dead broke. What do you do? Hitchhiking, of course! Leiden biologist found that certain bacteria use this very same tactic: their spores hop on motile bacteria ...
Cell & Microbiology
Mar 24, 2021
0
8
Corn didn't start out as the powerhouse crop it is today. No, for most of the thousands of years it was undergoing domestication and improvement, corn grew humbly within the limits of what the environment and smallholder ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 16, 2021
0
35
Each spring in the North Sea, tiny algae grow in large numbers and release loads of sugar into the water—a feast for bacteria. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and the University of Greifswald ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 9, 2021
0
12
Interspecies interactions are the foundation of ecosystems, from soil to ocean to human gut. Among the many different types of interactions, syntrophy is a particularly important and mutually beneficial interspecies interaction ...
Ecology
Mar 4, 2021
0
3
New research suggests that the ability of green algae to eat bacteria is likely much more widespread than previously thought, a finding that could be crucial to environmental and climate science. The work, led by scientists ...
Cell & Microbiology
Mar 2, 2021
0
5
Spring snowmelt in the Alps is occurring earlier in the year due to climate change and as a result triggering abrupt deviations in mountain ecosystems. These changes could negatively affect the functioning of these valuable ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 25, 2021
1
12
Ancient alchemists dreamed of transforming base materials like lead into gold and other valuable commodities. While such efforts generally came to naught, researchers today are having some success in extracting a variety ...
Cell & Microbiology
Feb 18, 2021
1
24
In shallow water, less than 30 meters, the survival of hard corals depends on photosynthetic unicellular algae (zooxanthellae) living in their tissues. But how does the coral adapt at depth when the light disappears? French ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 16, 2021
0
5
