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Categories: Environmental: Biodiversity, Space: Cosmology

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Two galaxies in the early universe, which contain extremely productive star factories, have been studied by a team of scientists. Using powerful telescopes to split the galaxies' light into individual colors, the scientists were amazed to discover light from many different molecules -- more than ever before at such distances. Studies like this could revolutionize our understanding of the lives of the most active galaxies when the universe was young, the researchers believe.

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Plants emit odors for a variety of reasons, such as to communicate with each other, to deter herbivores or to respond to changing environmental conditions. An interdisciplinary team of researchers carried out a study to investigate how biodiversity influences the emission of these substances. For the first time, they were able to show that species-rich forests emit less of these gases into the atmosphere than monocultures. It was previously assumed that species-rich forests release more emissions. The Leipzig team has now been able to disprove this assumption experimentally.

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Likening it to providing more runways at busy airports, researchers at North Carolina State University found in a new study that adding protruding rocks to restored streams can help attract female aquatic insects that lay their eggs on the rock bottoms or sides. 

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A 20-year experiment in the Sierra Nevada confirms that different forest management techniques -- prescribed burning, restoration thinning or a combination of both -- are effective at reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire in California. These treatments also improve forest health, making trees more resilient to stressors like drought and bark beetles, and they do not negatively impact plant or wildlife biodiversity within individual tree stands, the research found.

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An international study has analyzed the distribution of 115 species of birds in spring and 72 that spend the winter in different cities. The study provides information on how to design urban areas that favor biodiversity and public wellbeing.

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A challenge among three housemates to identify species around their inner-Brisbane home has resulted in an academic research paper, showcasing the rich biodiversity in urban landscapes.  

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Record breaking marine heatwaves will cause devastating mass coral bleaching worldwide in the next few years, according to a coral reef scientist.

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Increasing urbanization worldwide is a growing threat to biodiversity. At the same time, flowering plants are often more diverse in cities than in the countryside. This is due to flowering plants and agricultural crops, which are increasingly being grown in cities. A recent study shows that the interactions between plants and pollinators, which are important for agricultural production, are surprisingly dynamic. For example, the plant and bee species involved in pollination vary greatly between the seasons.

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A team of sustainability scientists recently announced that they have developed a community-based framework, founded on extensive local and traditional knowledge, to help assess and respond to the kinds of ecological threats that are widely dispersed across a varied landscape and whose solutions are not immediately obvious. The framework, which was developed to address watershed issues in Honduras's Lake Yojoa, is widely applicable to a broad range of threats facing ecological commons wherever they may occur around the world.

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Galactic winds enable the exchange of matter between galaxies and their surroundings. In this way, they limit the growth of galaxies, that is, their star formation rate. Although this had already been observed in the local universe, an international research team has just revealed the existence of the phenomenon in galaxies which are more than 7 billion years old and actively forming stars, the category to which most galaxies belong. The team's findings thus show this is a universal process.

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A new report equips policymakers with the latest and most pivotal climate science research from the previous 18 months, synthesized to help inform negotiations at COP28 and policy implementation through 2024 and beyond.

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Through analysis of high-resolution data from a ten-meter telescope in Hawaii, researchers have succeeded in generating new knowledge about three stars at the very heart of the Milky Way. The stars proved to be unusually young with a puzzling chemical composition that surprised the researchers.

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As the climate warms, preserving forest cover will be increasingly important for wildlife conservation, finds a study of North American mammals.

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Astronomers studying images from the James Webb Space Telescope have identified an object as a 'dusty star-forming galaxy' from nearly 1 billion years after the Big Bang. They have also discovered more than a dozen additional candidates, suggesting these galaxies might be three to 10 times as common as expected. If that conclusion is confirmed, it suggests the early universe was much dustier than previously thought.

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Some nonnative plants cultivated in public gardens or arboretums are escaping to become invasive in wild forests.

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Children must be taught more about the importance of plants if education about climate change and sustainability is to be effective, experts have warned.

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The universe is expanding. How fast it does so is described by the so-called Hubble-Lemaitre constant. But there is a dispute about how big this constant actually is: Different measurement methods provide contradictory values. This so-called 'Hubble tension' poses a puzzle for cosmologists. Researchers are now proposing a new solution: Using an alternative theory of gravity, the discrepancy in the measured values can be easily explained -- the Hubble tension disappears.

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There's a species of ant that is so rare, only a handful of records exist from across the entire eastern United States. North Carolina State University researcher Michelle Kirchner not only found these ants in the Triangle region of North Carolina, she is the first to document an entire colony for scientists, taxonomists and ant-thusiasts everywhere. It is the first time males of the species have been collected or photographed.

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Farmland often harbors a multitude of pathogens which attack plants and reduce yields. A research team has now shown that inoculating the soil with mycorrhizal fungi can help maintain or even improve yields without the use of additional fertilizers or pesticides. In a large-scale field trial, plant yield increased by up to 40 percent.

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While life on Earth is relatively new, geologically speaking, the ingredients that combined to form it might be much older than once thought. The simplest amino acid, carbamic acid, could have formed alongside stars or planets within interstellar ices. The findings could be used to train deep space instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope to search for prebiotic molecules in distant, star-forming regions of the universe.