Tiny DNA 'hitchhikers' may be reshaping life in thawing Arctic soils
Amid the peatlands of northern Sweden, billions of microbes are quietly rewriting their genetic playbooks—and doing so far more often than scientists realized.
Amid the peatlands of northern Sweden, billions of microbes are quietly rewriting their genetic playbooks—and doing so far more often than scientists realized.
Ecology
Jun 29, 2026
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Certain plants, including legumes, form specialized root organs known as nodules. These plants establish symbiotic relationships with nitrogen-fixing bacteria and utilize atmospheric nitrogen. This process, termed "root nodule ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Jun 29, 2026
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The tight fit of a baby's head through a mother's birth canal, which causes great difficulty in childbirth, is not unique to humans, as previously understood. Instead, some small-bodied primate babies have heads almost twice ...
Plants & Animals
Jun 29, 2026
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How many insects and spiders live in 1 square meter (11 square feet) of meadow? What impact do humans have on this biodiversity in mowed meadows, lawns and roadside verges? A new online tool answers these questions: the Insect ...
Ecology
Jun 29, 2026
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Red-tailed hawks can compensate for feather loss during molt by subtly changing their wing and tail movements, according to a new study by University of California, Davis, researchers in the College of Engineering and the ...
Ecology
Jun 29, 2026
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For more than three decades, researchers studying genomes have relied on foundational resources such as Repbase and, more recently, Dfam to identify and classify transposable elements—the mobile DNA sequences that shape genome ...
Biotechnology
Jun 29, 2026
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A tiny, aquatic, single-celled organism can contract to one-quarter of its body length in less than 5 milliseconds—hundreds of times faster than a human can blink. Researchers have discovered that the organism, Spirostomum ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jun 29, 2026
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A new study from the Honduran Mosquitia shows how simple, noninvasive technology can help solve one of the most common challenges in wildlife conservation: identifying the species actually responsible for crop damage. The ...
Ecology
Jun 29, 2026
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12
The AI-based program AlphaFold predicts a protein's 3D structure with remarkable accuracy. However, it tends to reduce heterogeneous structures to a single dominant conformation, or shape, and overlooks experimental conditions ...
Biotechnology
Jun 29, 2026
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27
Grasslands account for roughly 40% of terrestrial ecosystems and are paramount to global food security. Wild grasslands provide food for livestock and habitat for pollinators and act as a carbon sink in the era of climate ...
Ecology
Jun 29, 2026
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