Green frogs in the suburbs are seeing a gender revolution.
A new Yale study shows that estrogen in suburban yards is changing the ratio of male and female green frogs at nearby ponds. Higher levels of estrogen in areas where there are shrubs, vegetable gardens, and manicured lawns are disrupting frogs' endocrine systems, according to the study. That, in turn, is driving up the number of female frogs and lowering the number of male frogs.
Methylmercury, a potent neurotoxin, is especially high in Arctic marine life but until recently, scientists haven't been able to explain why. Now, research from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health suggests that high levels of methylmercury in Arctic life are a byproduct of global warming and the melting of sea-ice in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions.
As climate change accelerates ice melt in the Arctic, polar bears may find caribou and snow geese replacing seals as an important food source, shows a recent study published in the journal PLOS ONE. The research, by Linda Gormezano and Robert Rockwell at the American Museum of Natural History, is based on new computations incorporating caloric energy from terrestrial food sources and indicates that the bears' extended stays on land may not be as grim as previously suggested.
When a jogger sets out on his evening run, the active movements of his arms and legs are accompanied by involuntary changes in the position of the head relative to the rest of the body. Yet the jogger does not experience feelings of dizziness like those induced in the passive riders of a rollercoaster, who have no control over the abrupt dips and swoops to which they are exposed. The reason for the difference lies in the vestibular organ (VO) located in the inner ear, which controls balance and posture.
Magnetism and ferroelectricity: two properties which are particularly important for technology. The former is well known in empirical uses: it makes the needle of the compass point towards the North Pole, a magnetic field can align magnetic moments called spin of the electrons that make up the material.
In the game of wheat genetics, Jorge Dubcovsky's laboratory at UC Davis has hit a grand slam, unveiling for the fourth time in a dozen years a gene that governs wheat vernalization, the biological process requiring cold temperatures to trigger flower formation.
Identification of the newly characterized VRN-D4 gene and its three counterpart genes is crucial for understanding the vernalization process and developing improved varieties of wheat, which provides about one-fifth of the calories and proteins that we humans consume globally.
A recent study by a multi-disciplinary team of Baylor University researchers found that a popular herbicide does not appear to have a long-term, measurable impact on aquatic plant life.
The study looked at atrazine, a common herbicide used to control weeds in corn and sorghum crops in large-scale farming operations, at the “level of concern” as identified by United States Environmental Protection Agency.
Researchers have identified a mutation in plants that allows them to break down TNT, an explosive that has become highly prevalent in soil in the last century, particularly at manufacturing waste sites, mines, and military conflict zones.
Why aren't there more lions? That was what puzzled McGill PhD student Ian Hatton, when he started looking at the proportion of predators to prey across dozens of parks in East and Southern Africa. In this case, the answer had nothing to do with isolated human hunters. The parks were teeming with potentially tasty treats for the lions. So one might imagine that the population of lions in each park would increase to match the available prey.
High levels of saturated fat in the blood could make an individual more prone to inflammation and tissue damage, a new study suggests.
Received wisdom on the health risks of eating saturated fat has been called into question recently. This new research supports the view that excessive consumption of saturated fat can be bad for us.
Each year, humans reduce the number of trees worldwide by 15 billion. This is one of the startling conclusions of new research published in the journal Nature. The study also estimates the Earth is home to more than three trillion trees – that’s 3,000 billion – so you may think that while 15 billion is a very large number, humans shouldn’t be at risk of making significant changes to global tree cover.
A new Duke University-led study has revealed the presence of radioactive contaminants in coal ash from all three major U.S. coal-producing basins.
The study found that levels of radioactivity in the ash were up to five times higher than in normal soil, and up to 10 times higher than in the parent coal itself because of the way combustion concentrates radioactivity.
The finding raises concerns about the environmental and human health risks posed by coal ash, which is currently unregulated and is stored in coal-fired power plants' holding ponds and landfills nationwide.
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a particle collider for nuclear physics research at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, smashes large nuclei together at close to the speed of light to recreate the primordial soup of fundamental particles that existed in the very early universe. Experiments at RHIC-a DOE Office of Science User Facility that attracts more than 1,000 collaborators from around the world-have shown that this primordial soup, known as quark-gluon plasma (QGP), flows like a nearly friction free "perfect" liquid.
Examination of fossil fragments from Panama has led Smithsonian scientists and colleagues to the discovery of a new genus and species of river dolphin that has been long extinct. The team named it Isthminia panamensis. The specimen not only revealed a new species to science, but also shed new light onto the evolution of today's freshwater river dolphin species.
Research into 430,000-year-old fossils collected in northern Spain found that the evolution of the human body's size and shape has gone through four main stages, according to a paper published this week.