SciGlow | All Science News In One Place
SciGlow is a newsletter of science stories from the major research labs. Headlines link to in-depth articles and editorials. SciGlow keeps scientists and others up-to-date on current research.
Fleets of microscopic machines toil away in your cells, carrying out critical biological tasks and keeping you alive. By combining theory and experiment, researchers have discovered the surprising way one of these machines, called the spindle, avoids slowdowns: congestion. The spindle divides chromosomes in half during cell division, ensuring that both offspring cells contain a … Read more
Bananas are recognised as the most important fruit crop – providing food, nutrition and income for millions in both rural and urban areas across the globe. While many reports have looked at the impact of climate change on agricultural production, the effect rising temperatures and changing rainfall has on crucial tropical crops such as the … Read more
The first documented discovery of “extreme corals” in mangrove lagoons around Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is yielding important information about how corals deal with environmental stress, scientists say. Thirty four species of coral were found to be regularly exposed to extreme low pH, low oxygen and highly variable temperature conditions making two mangrove lagoons on … Read more
Plant genetic varieties in Central Europe could collapse due to temperature extremes and drought brought on by climate change. According to a new paper published in Nature today, only a few individuals of a species have already adapted to extreme climate conditions. These findings suggest that the overall species genetic diversity could be greatly diminished. … Read more
Crows can voluntarily control the release and onset of their calls, suggesting that songbird vocalizations are under cognitive control, according to a study published August 27 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Katharina Brecht of the University of Tübingen, and colleagues. Songbirds are renowned for their acoustically elaborate songs; these show a degree of flexibility, potentially … Read more
Meet the world’s first gene-edited reptiles: albino lizards roughly the size of your index finger. Researchers used CRISPR-Cas9 to make the lizards, providing a technique for gene editing outside of major animal models. In their study, publishing August 27 in the journal Cell Reports, the researchers also show that the lizards can successfully pass gene-edited alleles … Read more
Silicon is one of the most abundant chemical elements in the universe and, after oxygen, the second one on Earth. In the ocean, it is part of sediments, minerals and rocks and, more importantly, it occurs dissolved in the seawater. This dissolved silicon plays a pivotal role in the ecological functioning of the global oceans. … Read more
Animals that do well in urban areas tend to be the ones that learn to make use of resources such as the food humans throw away. But is our food actually good for them? A new study published in The Condor: Ornithological Applications suggests that a diet of human foods such as discarded cheeseburgers might be giving … Read more
Big brains can help an animal mount quick, flexible behavioral responses to frequent or unexpected environmental changes. But some birds just don’t need ’em. A global study comparing 2,062 birds finds that, in highly variable environments, birds tend to have either larger or smaller brains relative to their body size. Birds with smaller brains tend … Read more
Over the past 300 years, 79 plants have been confirmed extinct from three of the world’s biodiversity hotspots located in South Africa – the Cape Floristic Region, the Succulent Karoo, and the Maputuland-Pondoland-Albany corridor. According to a study published in the journal Current Biology this week, this represents a shocking 45.4% of all known plant extinctions from … Read more