Our genes shape our gut bacteria, new research shows

Nonprofits and companies planting trees in the tropics may often pick species for their commercial rather than ecological value, researchers found in a new analysis of organizations' publicly available data. They also found many may not have tracked the trees' survival. Tree planting is a promising, but controversial, restoration strategy for fighting climate change. A new study in the journal Biological Conservation provides a detailed look at what restoration organizations across the tropics are actually doing on the ground. "We found some organizations placed an emphasis on biological diversity and forest restoration in their mission statements. When we looked at the species they reported ...

Major ecosystem changes like sea-level rise, desertification and lake warming are fueling uncertainty about the future. Many initiatives - such as those fighting to fully eradicate non-native species, or to combat wildfires - focus on actively resisting change to preserve a slice of the past. However, resisting ecosystem transformation is not always a feasible approach. According to a new paper published today in the Ecological Society of America's journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, accepting and directing ecosystem change are also viable responses, and should not necessarily be viewed as fallback options or as last resorts. The paper presents a set of guiding principles for applying a "RAD" strategy - a framework that involves ...

BENGALURU, India (July 8, 2021) - A new study led by WCS-India documents how a big cat deity worshipped by Indigenous Peoples facilitates coexistence between humans and leopards. The study, published in a special issue of the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science: Human-Wildlife Dynamics called Understanding Coexistence with Wildlife documents how the Indigenous Warli people of Maharashtra, India, worship Waghoba, a leopard/tiger deity to gain protection from leopards, and how they have lived side-by-side with them for centuries (formerly tigers, too). The researchers have identified over 150 shrines dedicated ...

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine have shown that a type of echocardiogram, a common test to evaluate whether a person's heart is pumping properly, may be useful in predicting which patients with COVID-19 are most at risk of developing atrial fibrillation -- an irregular heartbeat that can increase a person's risk for heart failure and stroke, among other heart issues. The new findings, END ...

Ever since the 1986 discovery that copper oxide materials, or cuprates, could carry electrical current with no loss at unexpectedly high temperatures, scientists have been looking for other unconventional superconductors that could operate even closer to room temperature. This would allow for a host of everyday applications that could transform society by making energy transmission more efficient, for instance. Nickel oxides, or nickelates, seemed like a promising candidate. They're based on nickel, which sits next to copper on the periodic table, and the two elements have some common characteristics. It ...

Conditions in the tropical ocean affect weather patterns worldwide. The most well-known examples are El Niño or La Niña events, but scientists believe other key elements of the tropical climate remain undiscovered. In a study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists from the University of Washington and NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory use remotely-piloted sailboats to gather data on cold air pools, or pockets of cooler air that form below tropical storm clouds. "Atmospheric cold pools are cold air masses that flow outward beneath intense thunderstorms and alter the surrounding environment," ...

In a critical next step toward room-temperature superconductivity at ambient pressure, Paul Chu, Founding Director and Chief Scientist at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston (TcSUH), Liangzi Deng, research assistant professor of physics at TcSUH, and their colleagues at TcSUH conceived and developed a pressure-quench (PQ) technique that retains the pressure-enhanced and/or -induced high transition temperature (Tc) phase even after the removal of the applied pressure that generates this phase. Pengcheng Dai, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and his group, and Yanming Ma, Dean of the College of Physics ...

The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), one of China's key national science and technology infrastructure facilities, has accurately measured the brightness over 3.5 orders of magnitude of the standard candle in high-energy astronomy, thus calibrating a new standard for ultra-high-energy (UHE) gamma-ray sources. The standard candle is the famous Crab Nebula, which evolved from the "guest star" recorded by the imperial astronomers of China's Song Dynasty. LHAASO has also discovered a photon with an energy of 1.1 PeV (1 PeV = one quadrillion electronvolts), indicating the presence of an extremely powerful electron accelerator--about one-tenth the size of the solar system--located in the core ...

As tectonic plates slip past each other, the rivers that cross fault lines change shape. The shifting ground stretches the river channels until the water breaks its course and flows onto new paths. In a study published July 9 in Science, researchers at UC Santa Cruz created a model that helps predict this process. It provides broad context to how rivers and faults interact to shape the nearby topography. The group originally planned to use the San Andreas fault in the Carrizo Plain of California to study how fault movement shapes the landscapes near rivers. But after spending hours pouring over aerial imagery and remote topographic data, their understanding of how the terrain evolves began to change. They realized that rivers play a more active ...

For the first time, Princess Margaret researchers have mapped out where and how leukemia begins and develops in infants with Down syndrome in preclinical models, paving the way to potentially prevent this cancer in the future. Children with Down syndrome have a 150-fold increased risk of developing myeloid leukemia within the first five years of their life. Yet the mechanism by which the extra copy of chromosome 21 predisposes to leukemia remains unclear. Down syndrome is a genetic disorder caused by a random error in cell division in early human development that results in an extra copy of chromosome 21. This extra copy is what causes the developmental changes and physical ...