A storm is coming over the green hills that surround Ljubljana and it is making the bees anxious. Normally, urban beekeeper Gorazd Trušnovec would call it a day when the weather starts to turn. Instead, he is up a ladder, 12 metres (40 feet) above a city road, facing a squirming mass of bees in […]
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To rapidly detect the presence of E. coli in drinking water, Cornell University food scientists now can employ a bacteriophage — a genetically engineered virus — in a test used in hard-to-reach areas around the world. Rather than sending water samples to laboratories and waiting days for results, this new test can be administered locally […]
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The devilish-looking manta ray spends most of its day on the sea floor, foraging for plankton with its mouth wide open. They can go for up to ten minutes without closing their mouths, and even then just for a brief moment. You’d think that this car-sized filter feeder would get clogged, but judging from countless […]
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By Amy McDermott At the height of the Alaskan summer, a troupe of students hiked up the middle of a shallow creek. Undergraduates and grads from the University of Washington, the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Kamchatka State Technical University in eastern Russia carried handheld clickers to count the multitudes of salmon thrashing upstream to […]
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Termite colonies have been found to thrive and reproduce without males, new research from the University of Sydney reveals. The findings provide new evidence that males aren’t required to maintain some advanced animal populations. They add momentum to questions about the impact and function of males in animal societies. It is well known that many […]
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New findings show that a micro RNA from the shoot keeps legume roots susceptible to symbiotic infection by downregulating a gene that would otherwise hinder root responses to symbiotic bacteria. These findings help us understand what it takes to make nitrogen-fixing symbiosis efficient, and what we need to do to exploit it agronomically. An international […]
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Conservationists have welcomed the decision by Maxim’s, one of Hong Kong’s biggest restaurant chains, to ban shark fin at all of its outlets from January 2020 The practice is damaging shark populations, with numbers drastically declining around the world. While blue sharks make up the majority, many other species are also targeted including the endangered […]
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Enduring subzero temperatures that make your face freeze, dressing as a bear, and getting chased by an angry male muskox, are all in a day’s work for biologist Joel Berger. His experiences and scientific insights are featured in a new book that focuses on the lives and survival strategies of muskoxen and other cold-adapted animals. […]
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On 26/07/2018, the field team of the Asters Conservatory of Natural Areas of Haute-Savoie, responsible for the survey of bearded vulture breeding pairs in the area, was hoping to check if the chick had already fledged. They found the bird had left the nest, but was not able to fly. For a whole month, the […]
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A federal judge restored endangered species protections for grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park on Monday, The Huffington Post reported, putting a permanent halt to plans by Wyoming and Idaho to launch the first Yellowstone-area grizzly hunt in four decades. U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen had already placed a temporary restraining order on […]
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