Millimeter by millimeter, your hair is building a record of your diet. As hair strands are built from amino acids that come from your food, they preserve the chemical traces of the protein in that food. It's a strong enough ...
Analytical Chemistry
Aug 3, 2020
1
1467
When it came to eating, an upright, 2-million-year-old African hominid had a diet unlike virtually all other known human ancestors, says a study led by the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany ...
Archaeology
Jun 27, 2012
6
0
A common weed harbors important clues about how to create drought resistant crops in a world beset by climate change.
Molecular & Computational biology
Aug 5, 2022
12
15530
The evolutionary relationships among grasses—including important crop plants like wheat, rice, corn, and sugarcane—have been clarified in a new molecular study of the grass family tree. Having a clear picture of the relationships ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Mar 2, 2022
0
199
Some plants master a special form of solar energy utilization that offers great advantages under warm conditions. A recent study now provides new insights into an enzyme that plays a central role in this so-called C4 photosynthesis. ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 13, 2021
0
14
One of the major challenges the world faces is how to provide sustainable sources of energy that meet societal needs as the global population continues to grow. Bioenergy crops have garnered increasing attention as a renewable ...
Agriculture
Nov 2, 2021
0
43
An impressive body of evidence published this week reveals the answer to a mystery that has puzzled plant scientists for more than 30 years: the role of the molecule suberin in the leaves of some of our most productive crops. ...
Plants & Animals
Mar 2, 2021
0
123
During photosynthesis, leaves capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and transform it into organic compounds. However, getting from the leaf surface to the enzymes where carbon is fixed inside leaves is full of ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 2, 2020
0
197
Between 10 million and 6 million years ago, vegetation across much of the world underwent a transformation, as warmth-adapted grasses displaced previously dominant plants, shrubs and trees. The new grasses carried out the ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 23, 2019
0
226
In the dramatically changing conditions of ancient Earth, organisms had to evolve new strategies to keep up. From the mid-Oligocene, roughly 30 million years ago, to the mid-to-late Miocene, about 5 million years ago, carbon ...
Ecology
Nov 8, 2018
0
170
