Small prey fish can grow a bigger 'eye' on their rear fins as a way of distracting predators and dramatically boosting their chances of survival, new scientific research has found.
Researchers from Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) have made a world-first discovery that, when constantly threatened with being eaten, small damsel fish not only grow a larger false 'eye spot' near their tail – but also reduce the size of their real eyes.
Exceptional preservation of glass inclusions in intrusive rocks of the Siberian Large Igneous Province evidences evolutionary processes of tholeiitic basalts, the most common terrestrial magmas.
Silicate liquid immiscibility between aluminosilicate and iron-rich paired melts is recorded by melt pools in native iron. These unique snapshots of magma evolution prove that cooling and crystallizing basaltic magma reaches a two-liquid stability field, and two contrasting silicate melts split at large-scale.
When plant roots detect the presence of roots of other species, they respond in an adaptive manner: by growing away from the competing roots and increasing the expression of 14 genes implicated in the response against pathogens, according to a study.
Christoph Schmid and colleagues grew the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana with or without a mild competitor, the mouse-ear hawkweed Hieracium pilosella, and measured changes in the level of expression of approximately 22000 A. thaliana genes.
Roots of lupine plants exude a gel that facilitates water uptake from the deeper, wetter soil layers, while preventing water loss from older roots closer to the surface, a new study reports.
Plants can respond to water shortage by reducing transpiration or by growing deeper roots, but also by modifying the soil. For example, roots exude mucilage, a gel that increases the water holding capacity ("wettability") of the soil.
Boulder, Colo., USA – New Geology postings discuss a vanished link between Antarctica and Australia; the West Salton Detachment fault in California, USA; chemical interaction between peridotite and intruding melts in the Northern Apennines, Italy; calving barchan dunes; the nature of black shale in the Late Devonian Appalachian Basin; the August 2008 avulsion belt of the Kosi River, India; reef island formation; and a one-year record of eight quakes within dune deposits of the Navajo Sandstone, Utah, USA.
Tropical Storm Erin ran into cooler waters and dry, stable air over the Eastern Atlantic that sapped its strength and weakening the storm to depression status. NOAA's GOES-East satellite showed the storm waning today.
James Bond had his reasons for ordering his martinis "shaken, not stirred." Similarly, drug manufacturers need to make sure the molecules in a new drug are arranged in an exact manner, lest there be dire consequences. Specifically, they need to be wary of enantiomers, mirror-image molecules composed of the same atoms, but arranged differently.
Monitoring slow earthquakes may provide a basis for reliable prediction in areas where slow quakes trigger normal earthquakes, according to Penn State geoscientists.
"We currently don't have any way to remotely monitor when land faults are about to move," said Chris Marone, professor of geophysics. "This has the potential to change the game for earthquake monitoring and prediction, because if it is right and you can make the right predictions, it could be big."
Sunny Jung continues to redefine the views on the laws of physics, and in doing so, impacts the research on topics as varied as drug delivery methods to fuel efficiency.
HOUSTON -- (Aug. 15, 2013) -- A Rice University laboratory has improved upon its ability to determine molecular structures in three dimensions in ways that challenge long-used standards.
By measuring the vibrations between atoms using femtosecond-long laser pulses, the Rice lab of chemist Junrong Zheng is able to discern the positions of atoms within molecules without the restrictions imposed by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) imaging.
Researchers at Aalto University, Finland and the University of Tokyo have succeeded for the first time in experimentally measuring a probability distribution for entropy production of electrons. Entropy production means an increase in disorder when electrons are moved individually between two microscopic conductors of differing temperatures.
Researchers at Umeå University, together with researchers at Uppsala University and Stockholm University, show in a new study how nitrogen doped graphene can be rolled into perfect Archimedean nano scrolls by adhering magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles on the surface of the graphene sheets. The new material may have very good properties for application as electrodes in for example Li-ion batteries.
Climate change is set to trigger more frequent and severe heat waves in the next 30 years regardless of the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) we emit into the atmosphere, a new study has shown.
Extreme heat waves such as those that hit the US in 2012 and Australia in 2009 -- dubbed three-sigma events by the researchers -- are projected to cover double the amount of global land by 2020 and quadruple by 2040.
Extremes such as the severe heat wave last year in the US or the one 2010 in Russia are likely to be seen much more often in the near future. A few decades ago, they were practically absent. Today, due to man-made climate change monthly heat extremes in summer are already observed on 5 percent of the land area. This is projected to double by 2020 and quadruple by 2040, according to a study by scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM).
Atmospheric physicist Nick Gorkavyi missed witnessing an event of the century last winter when a meteor exploded over his hometown of Chelyabinsk, Russia. From Greenbelt, Md., however, NASA's Gorkavyi and colleagues witnessed a never-before-seen view of the atmospheric aftermath of the explosion.