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Categories: Ecology: Endangered Species, Offbeat: Computers and Math

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Researchers have developed a brain-computer interface (BCI) that has enabled a woman with severe paralysis from a brainstem stroke to speak through a digital avatar.

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Many plants and crops rely on insects to pollinate them so they can reproduce. A new study has shown that several flowering plants from the group Euonymus are pollinated by fungus gnats, a dipteran insect. Specifically, they pollinate Euonymus plants which have red-petaled flowers with short stamens and yogurt-like scent. Although fungus gnats are known to pollinate hundreds of plant species, this study shows that the particular traits of red Euonymus flowers were likely to have been acquired via pollination syndrome, evolving over a process of natural selection to be pollinated specifically by fungus gnats. This research highlights the important role of Diptera, which are commonly regarded as pests, in plant diversity and evolution.

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By increasing the diversity of indigenous plants in urban areas, researchers have seen a seven times increase in the number of insect species in just three years, confirming the ecological benefits of urban greening projects.

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Birds native to the tropical Andes are threatened by increasing agricultural development in the region. A new study combines a meta-analysis of papers on birds across the Andes with five years of fieldwork in Peru, revealing that open farmlands result in up to a 60% decline in the number of species in an area. The study documents how specific species are affected and provides tailored guidance for conservationists trying to protect them.

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Researchers demonstrate that a vast multitude of birds and mammals can be detected by simply swabbing the DNA left behind by animals from leaves. They showcased the power of this approach in an ecosystem that hosts a ton of wildlife and where detecting animals has historically proven extremely challenging -- the tropical rainforest.

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Radiocarbon dating on bones in the La Brea Tar Pits lead archaeologists to warn that history may be repeating itself.

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Conventional wisdom among ecologists holds that the more species there are inhabiting an ecosystem, the less vulnerable any one species will be to a threat like a parasite. A new study of tadpoles illustrates how overlapping biological and environmental factors can complicate how we value protecting diverse animal communities. The researchers found that environmental pollutants like road salt influence whether increased biodiversity helps or hinders disease outbreaks in wildlife, which can complicate how we value protecting diverse animal communities.

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Bats gather to feast as nocturnal insects fly through mountain passes in the Pyrenees each autumn, new research shows.

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New findings have found that water use efficiency has stalled since 2001 which implies not as much CO2 was being taken in by plants and more water was consumed and that could have implications on carbon cycling, agricultural production and water resources.

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Maize roots secrete certain chemicals that affect the quality of soil. In some fields, this effect increases yields of wheat planted subsequent to maize in the same soil by more than 4%. While the findings from several field experiments show that these effects are highly variable, in the long term they may yet help to make the cultivation of grains more sustainable, without the need for additional fertilizers or pesticides.

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Plants orient their organs in response to the gravity vector, with roots growing towards gravity and shoots growing in the opposite direction. The movement of statoliths responding to the inclination relative to the gravity vector is employed for gravity sensing in both plants and animals. However, in plants, the statolith takes the form of a high-density organelle, known as an amyloplast, which settles toward gravity within the gravity sensing cell. Despite the significance of this gravity sensing mechanism, the exact process behind it has eluded scientists for over a century.

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Rapid alkalinization factors (RALFs) are required for pollen tube germination and elongation, an essential process in plant fertilization. But their role in monocot plants remains unexplored. Scientists have now identified OsRALF17 and OsRALF19 in rice and determined their functions in pollen tube germination and growth. This study provides novel insights into the role of RALFs in rice fertilization, paving the way for enhanced grain yield.

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A 390-million-year-old moss called Takakia lives in some of Earth's most remote places, including the icy cliffs of the Tibetan Plateau. In a decade-long project, a team of scientists climbed some of the tallest peaks in the world to find Takakia, sequence its DNA for the first time, and study how climate change is impacting the moss. Their results show that Takakia is one of the fastest evolving species ever studied -- but it likely isn't evolving fast enough to survive climate change.

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Researchers hope that a new, publicly available database they have created will shrink, not grow, over time. That's because it is a compendium of the thousands of understudied proteins encoded by genes in the human genome, whose existence is known but whose functions are mostly not.

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New research shows that electrical stimuli passed between neighboring electrodes can also affect non-neighboring electrodes. Known as non-locality, this discovery is a crucial milestone toward creating brain-like computers with minimal energy requirements.

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Researchers have unveiled an artificial intelligence-based model for computational imaging and microscopy without training with experimental objects or real data. The team introduced a self-supervised AI model nicknamed GedankenNet that learns from physics laws and thought experiments. Informed only by the laws of physics that universally govern the propagation of electromagnetic waves in space, the researchers taught their AI model to reconstruct microscopic images using only random artificial holograms -- synthesized solely from 'imagination' without relying on any real-world experiments, actual sample resemblances or real data.

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Poaching of two Critically Endangered Kordofan giraffes per year could result in extinction in just 15 years within Cameroon's Bénoué National Park without intervention.

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Northern muriquis, which live in the Atlantic forest of Brazil, are one of the most endangered species of monkey in the world. To better understand what goes on in the mating lives of muriquis, researchers turned to the monkeys' poop to help gain insight into how the primates choose their mates.

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A newly published study describes the response to sea level rise by the silver rice rat, an endangered species only found in the Florida Keys.

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Engineers have developed HADAR, or heat-assisted detection and ranging.