Новости за 14.01.2021

If you asked people which group of animals is the most abundant on earth, hardly anyone would know the right answer. Ants? Fish? No, and not humans either. The answer is nematodes, also known as roundworms. Four out of five animals on earth belong to this group, and the reason hardly anyone is aware of the fact is that they live underground, invisible to us. Together with thousands of other soil organisms, they quietly, discreetly and constantly perform enormously important services for the world above them.

It is at the confluence of different experiences that new theories come into being. Writing in this week's "Perspectives" in the journal Science, ASU researchers Kim Hill and Rob Boyd comment on new science by Barsbai et al analyzing human behavior in traditional societies and advocate for a new fully integrated evolutionary theory of human behavior.

Forests and other land ecosystems today absorb 30 percent of humanity's CO2 pollution, but rapid global warming could transform these natural 'sinks' into carbon 'sources' within a few decades, opening another daunting front in the fight against climate change, alarmed researchers have said.

Scientists based at Rothamsted and the University of Bristol Veterinary School have found a clear link between the weight of lambs early in their life and meat quality—which is good news for consumers, farmers, and the environment.

Tomato plants are especially vulnerable to foliar diseases that can kill them or impact yield. These problems require a number of pesticides in conventional crops and make organic production especially difficult.

A team of researchers at the University of Freiburg, has found that at least one kind of plant has leaves that grow slippery as it ages in an apparent attempt to ward off leaf-eating insects. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the group describes their study of rubber tree plant leaves and their impact on Colorado potato beetles.

Liquid droplets have recently gained renewed attention as a simplified model for a variety of fascinating physical phenomena at the scale of the cell nucleus to stellar black holes. In a new report now published in Science Advances, Yuyang Gu and a team of scientists in the U.S. presented an acoustofluidic centrifugation technique that used the entanglement of acoustic wave actuation and the spin of a fluidic droplet to accomplish nanoparticle enrichment and separation. They combined acoustic scanning... Читать дальше...