To look at how life evolved, scientists usually turn to the fossil record, but this record is often incomplete. Researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), alongside an international team of collaborators, have used another tool - the chromosomes of living animals - to uncover clues about our past. The study, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, reveals early events in the evolution of vertebrates, including how jawed vertebrates arose through hybridization between two species of primitive fish.
The insides of living cells can be seen in their natural state in greater detail than ever before using a new technique developed by researchers in Japan. This advance should help reveal the complex and fragile biological interactions of medical mysteries, like how stem cells develop or how to deliver drugs more effectively.
It has been estimated that in 2040 a quarter of the world's children will live in regions where clean and drinkable water is lacking. The desalination of seawater and the purification of wastewater are two possible methods to alleviate this, and researchers at Linköping University have developed a cheap and eco-friendly steam generator to desalinate and purify water using sunlight. The results have been published in the journal Advanced Sustainable Systems.
Polynyas--areas of open water with reduced ice cover that persists--in the Antarctic play an important role in regional atmosphere-ice-ocean interactions and are considered to help generate the global deep ocean conveyer belt. Polynyas therefore have a potential impact on the Earth's climate in terms of the production of sea ice and high-salinity shelf water.
Worldwide focus meat analogs keeps increasing to start producing vegetable protein non-cholesterol products containing essential amino acids. Extrusion is the best way to texture vegetable proteins. This is a method of processing raw materials in which the destruction of secondary bonds in protein molecules occurs, thus increasing their digestibility.
In recent years, high-humidity extrusion technology has become widely used as it makes it possible to obtain a fibrous meat-like structure from vegetable proteins.
A Danish-German research collaboration may have found a solution to the large climate impact from the world's rice production: By adding electric conductive cable bacteria to soil with rice plants, they could reduce methane emissions by more than 90%.
Half of world´s population is nourished by rice crops, but rice cultivation is harsh to he climate. The rice fields account for five percent of global emissions of the greenhouse gas methane, which is 25 times stronger than CO2.
Viruses are part of the human experience throughout our lives. They cause lots of different illnesses with the current coronavirus pandemic as just one example. While a vaccine does provide effective protection from viral infections, vaccines are only available for a select number of viruses. This is why antiviral drugs need to be found that can prevent or treat a viral infection.
Black poplar leaves infected by fungi are especially susceptible to attack by gypsy moth caterpillars. A research team at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, has now further investigated this observation. The scientists found that the young larvae of this herbivore upgrade their diet with fungal food: Caterpillars that fed on leaves covered with fungal spores grew faster and pupated a few days earlier than those feeding only on leaf tissue.
If we were talking about food, most experts would choose the former, but in the case of energy storage the opposite is true. It turns out that more energy can be stored by charging less often, but right up to 100%.
Tsukuba, Japan - Governments throughout the world use rockets to launch satellites and people into orbit. This currently requires a lot of high-energy fuel, which is 95% of total rocket mass. Because the launch cost of a rocket can reach 10 billion yen, launching a 1-gram payload is said to be the same as buying 1 gram of gold. Minimizing the total cost of launching rockets would maximize the scientific payloads and increase the feasibility of space exploration.