Ionizing radiation from nuclear disasters are known to be harmful to the natural environment. The Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant meltdown that occurred in 2011 is a prominent example of such a disaster in recent memory. ...
Ants are pretty much everywhere. There are more than 14,000 different species, spread over every continent except Antarctica, and researchers have estimated that there are more than four quadrillion individual ants on Earth—that's ...
Trees living in conditions where carbon dioxide (CO2) levels have been artificially elevated are likely to become more efficient in conserving water.
At a time when climate change is making many areas of the planet hotter and drier, it's sobering to think that deserts are relatively new biomes that have grown considerably over the past 30 million years. Widespread arid ...
The iconic yet endangered Amami rabbit (Pentalagus furnessi) has been shown to play a key role in seed dispersal for the non-photosynthetic plant Balanophora yuwanensis. This discovery, made by Professor Suetsugu Kenji and ...
Polyploidy is prevalent in plants and has played a significant role in the evolution of almost all angiosperm genomes. For example, many domesticated crops are either polyploids (e.g., wheat, coffee, cotton and peanut) or ...
Flowering plants (angiosperms) are the largest, most diversified, and most successful major lineage of green plants, with ~330,000 known species. In the past decade, the accelerated development of high-throughput sequencing ...
Twig mimicry is most common and diversified in Phasmatodea (stick and leaf insects), a group of iconic models for understanding the evolution of camouflage and mimicry among insects. Extant stick and leaf insects exhibit ...
In fossil leaves, puzzling structures are often visible under the microscope. Researchers at the University of Bonn have now been able to show for the first time that they originate from calcium oxalate crystals. On the one ...
Char from ancient fires and stalagmites in caves hold clues to the mysterious disappearance of Neanderthals from Europe.
