Showing posts with the label
Biodiversity
We know remarkably little about the diversity of life on Earth, which makes it hard to know with any certainty whether we're succeeding in our efforts to conserve it. The goal of the Intergovernm…
Can tumors teach us about animal evolution on Earth? Researchers believe so and now present a novel hypothesis of why animal diversity increased dramatically on Earth about half a billion years ago. …
There are more than 8 million species of living things on Earth, but none of them -- from 100-foot blue whales to microscopic bacteria -- has an advantage over the others in the universal struggle fo…
In August 2017, the Bolivian government passed a contentious law that paved the way for construction of a new 190-mile road cutting through one of the country's most iconic and biodiverse protect…
A new study has exposed the common treeshrew, a small and skittish mammal that inhabits the tropical forests of Southeast Asia, as an ecogeographical rule breaker. Credit: stock.adobe.com/Yale Univer…
Arid lands, which cover some 40 percent of Earth's terrestrial surface, are too dry to sustain much in the way of vegetation. But far from being barren, they are home to diverse communities of mi…
To make the iconic, twisted double helix that accounts for the diversity of life, DNA rules specify that G always pairs with C, and A with T. Michael Lynch’s group has now experimentally demonstrated…
New University of Colorado Boulder-led research shows that a long-held hypothesis about the factors that govern species ranges largely holds true, but may be the result of a previously underappreciat…
For the first time scientists have directly observed living bacteria in polar ice and snow -- an environment once considered sterile. The new evidence has the potential to alter perceptions about whi…
Just imagine, you are sitting on a sunny beach, contentedly letting the warm sand trickle through your fingers. Millions of sand grains. What you probably can't imagine: at the same time, billion…
Maps of the world's most important wilderness areas are now freely available online following a University of Queensland and Wildlife Conservation Society-led study published in Scientific Data …
A whopping 252 million years ago, Earth was crawling with bizarre animals, including dinosaur cousins resembling Komodo dragons and bulky early mammal-relatives, a million years before dinosaurs even…
Deep-sea animals have been systematically studied for over 100 years, yet scientists are still learning about what many of these animals eat. A new paper by MBARI researchers Anela Choy, Steve Haddoc…
Scientists at the University of Sheffield have discovered that living creatures’ responsiveness to changes in the environment can evolve and depends on the conditions they experienced in their past. …
How serious is the loss of species globally? Are material cycles in an ecosystem with few species changed? In order to find this out, the "Jena Experiment" was established in 2002, one of t…
Black rhinos, red wolves, whooping cranes: the global list of endangered species grows every year to the point where some researchers say we’re witnessing the start of Earth’s next mass extinction. S…
