News by Subject Earth Science

Carleton University's Marie Curie Global Fellow Dominique Roche has co-authored a paper on the barriers researchers face to publicly sharing their data, an issue that has gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article, Reported Individual Costs and Benefits of Sharing Open Data among Canadian Academic Faculty in Ecology and Evolution, was published in the journal BioScience.

Researchers have deciphered a trove of data that shows one season of extreme melt can reduce the Greenland Ice Sheet's capacity to store future meltwater - and increase the likelihood of future melt raising sea levels.

The observation that most of the viruses that cause human diseases come from other animals has led some researchers to attempt "zoonotic risk prediction" to second-guess the next virus to hit us. However, in an Essay publishing in journal PLOS Biology, led by Dr Michelle Wille at the University of Sydney, Australia with co-authors Jemma Geoghegan and Edward Holmes, it is proposed that these zoonotic risk predictions are of limited value and will not tell us which virus will cause the next pandemic.

Dietary sugars and gut microbes play a key role in promoting malaria parasite infection in mosquitoes. Researchers in China have uncovered evidence that mosquitoes fed a sugar diet show an increased abundance of the bacterial species Asaia bogorensis, which enhances parasite infection by raising the gut pH level. The study appears April 20 in the journal Cell Reports.

Various beetle species have gobbled through grain stores and weakened food production worldwide since ancient times. Now, researchers at the University of Copenhagen have discovered a better way of targeting and eliminating these teeny pests. Instead of using toxic pesticides that damage biodiversity, environment and human health, the researchers seek to exploit beetles' greatest strength against them -- their precisely regulated mechanism of balancing fluids.