For fruit crops such as apples, compromised skin appearance results in reduced market value. Identifying causes of fruit disorders and diseases can help producers modify growing strategies and increase profits and so researchers in Germany recently released a study of "skin spot", a disorder found in 'Elstar' and occasionally in 'Golden Delicious' apples. It is characterized by patches of small brownish dots that usually appear on the apples' skin after the fruit is moved from storage.
Earth
How might you make a new Earth? Our Terran "test kitchen" has given us a detailed recipe, it just wasn't clear how transposable it was in other areas, the same way a recipe in Los Angeles might not work as well in Denver. Now, astronomers have found evidence that the recipe for Earth also applies to terrestrial exoplanets orbiting distant stars.
"Our solar system is not as unique as we might have thought," says lead author Courtney Dressing of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "It looks like rocky exoplanets use the same basic ingredients."
Scientists have developed a detailed explanation of how white-nose syndrome (WNS) is killing millions of bats in North America, according to a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Wisconsin. The scientists created a model for how the disease progresses from initial infection to death in bats during hibernation.
A new study sheds light on space weather's impact on Earth. The authors show for the first time that plasma waves buffeting the planet's radiation belts are responsible for scattering charged particles into the atmosphere.
The study is the most detailed analysis so far of the link between these waves and the fallout of electrons from the planet's radiation belts. The belts are impacted by fluctuations in "space weather" caused by solar activity that can disrupt GPS satellites, communication systems, power grids and manned space exploration.
The ice on Greenland could only form due to processes in the deep Earth interior. Large-scale glaciations in the Arctic only began about 2.7 million years ago; before that, the northern hemisphere was largely free of ice for more than 500 million years. Scientists at the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ, Utrecht University, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and the University of Oslo could now explain why the conditions for the glaciation of Greenland only developed so recently on a geological time scale.
A whale that can live over 200 years with little evidence of age-related disease may provide untapped insights into how to live a long and healthy life. In Cell Reports, researchers present the complete bowhead whale genome and identify key differences compared to other mammals. Alterations in bowhead genes related to cell division, DNA repair, cancer, and aging may have helped increase its longevity and cancer resistance.
The menstrual cycle appears to have an effect on nicotine cravings, according to a new study by Adrianna Mendrek of the University of Montreal and its affiliated Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal. "Our data reveal that incontrollable urges to smoke are stronger at the beginning of the follicular phase that begins after menstruation. Hormonal decreases of oestrogen and progesterone possibly deepen the withdrawal syndrome and increase activity of neural circuits associated with craving," Mendrek said.
It's a comfortable narrative that being obese will lead to diabetes, heart disease and stroke, and it is certainly a risk factor, but just like 90 percent of smokers never get lung cancer and half of lung cancer patients never smoked, a comfortable narrative is creating a simplistic view of science.
Plant geneticists have sorted out the gene regulatory networks that control cell wall thickening by the synthesis of the three polymers, cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. The most rigid of the polymers, lignin, represents "a major impediment" to extracting sugars from plant biomass that can be used to make biofuels and so their genetic advance is expected to "serve as a foundation for understanding the regulation of a complex, integral plant component" and as a map for how future researchers might manipulate the polymer-forming processes to improve the efficiency of biofuel production.
Cholera is caused when the bacterium Vibrio cholerae infects the small intestine. The disease is characterized by acute watery diarrhea resulting in severe dehydration. EPFL scientists have now demonstrated that V. cholerae uses a tiny spear to stab and kill neighboring bacteria - even of its own kind - and then steal their DNA. "Horizontal gene transfer" allows the cholera bacterium to become more virulent by absorbing the traits of its prey.
A new species of frog does what no other frog does: It gives birth to live tadpoles instead of laying eggs.
A member of the Asian group of fanged frogs, the new species was discovered a few decades ago by Indonesian researcher Djoko Iskandar and was thought to give direct birth to tadpoles, though the frog's mating and an actual birth had never been observed before.
When the human genome was first sequenced, experts predicted they would find about 100,000 genes but the actual number turned out to be closer to 20,000. The question arose: how can a relatively small number of genes lay the blueprint for the complexities of the human body?
The explanation is that genes are subject to many and varied forms of regulation that can alter the form of that protein and can determine whether and how much of a gene product is made. Much of this regulation occurs during and just after DNA is transcribed into RNA.
Tropical storm Jangmi, known in the Philippines as Seniang, weakened to a tropical depression as it moved into the Sulu Sea and NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of the storm that showed its eastern side was still affecting the central and northern Philippines on Dec. 30.
A group of scientists led by researchers at the Université de Versailles' Institut Lavoisier in France has worked out how to stably gift-wrap a chemical gas known as nitric oxide within metal-organic frameworks. Such an encapsulated chemical may allow doctors to administer nitric oxide in a more highly controlled way to patients, suggesting new approaches for treating dangerous infections and heart conditions with the biologically-active substance.
In the already weird world of neutrinos, physicists have found evidence that these tiny particles might be involved in a weird reaction, even for neutrinos.