Weather was harsh in Pakistan for some years and created protracted drought in many parts of the country. But nature relented this year with timely rains that have been a boon for crops and enhanced availability of water in the…
Research was published this week showing that silk produced by transgenically engineered silkworms in the laboratory of Malcolm Fraser Jr., professor of biological sciences at University of Notre Dame, exhibits the highly sought-after strength and elasticity of spider silk. This…
The results of a study conducted by Serbian researchers, in collaboration with the Laboratoire de Dynamique, Interactions et Réactivité (LADIR, CNRS/UPMC), are unequivocal: the Belgrade fortress is not only threatened by the effects of coal burning, as was assumed until…
Winters in the Gobi desert are usually long and very cold but the winter of 2009/2010 was particularly severe, a condition Mongolians refer to as “dzud.” Millions of livestock died in Mongolia and the re-introduced wild Przewalski’s horse population crashed…
UCLA life scientists and their colleagues have discovered the first evidence of the H1N1 virus in animals in Africa. In one village in northern Cameroon, a staggering 89 percent of the pigs studied had been exposed to the H1N1 virus,…
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists have characterized the molecular mechanism behind some plants’ ability to resist rice blast, a fungal disease that affects cereal grain crops such as rice, wheat, rye and barley and can cause yield losses of…
Any multicellular animal, from a blue whale to a human being, poses a special difficulty for the theory of evolution. Most of the cells in its body will die without reproducing, and only a privileged few will pass their genes…
Scientists have discovered a new signal that helps invading bacteria communicate but also helps targeted rice plants coordinate defensive attacks on the disease-causing invaders, a finding that could lead to new methods of combating infection not just in plants, but…
Take a Petri dish containing crude petroleum and it will release a strong odor distinctive of the toxins that make up the fossil fuel. Sprinkle mushroom spores over the Petri dish and let it sit for two weeks in an…
Certain elements of the membranes surrounding cellular mitochondria, responsible for transporting potassium ions, are identical in the potato and in mammalian brain, suggest researchers from the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Their…
