News by Subject Biology

In a recent study published in the journal eLIFE a team of researchers, including lead author Jordan Okie of Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration and senior author Jim Elser of the School of Life Sciences, conducted experiments in the Cuatro Cienegas Basin in Mexico. Their goal was to shed light on how fundamental features of an organism's genome - its size, the way it encodes information, and the density of information--affect its ability to thrive in an extreme environment.

With a $2.3 million award from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an interdisciplinary team of Virginia Tech researchers led by Masoud Agah, the Virginia Microelectronics Consortium Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is working to revolutionize a testing process for these harmful pollutants, in particular for truck drivers.

Aerosol emissions from burning coal and wood are dangerous to human health, but it turns out that by cooling the Earth they also diminish global economic inequality, according to a new study by Carnegie's Yixuan Zheng, Geeta Persad, and Ken Caldeira, along with UC Irvine's Steven Davis.

A new MIT study suggests that iron fertilization may not have a significant impact on phytoplankton growth, at least on a global scale.

Many insects, mosses and lichens in the UK are bucking the trend of biodiversity loss, according to a comprehensive analysis of over 5,000 species led by UCL and the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), and published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

A Yale-affiliated scientist finds that even a few hours' exposure to ambient ultrafine particles common in air pollution may potentially trigger a nonfatal heart attack.

A new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, finds that while wildfires and smoke exposure are recognized by farmworkers and employers as a growing threat and safety concern, the means to address these concerns differs between the two groups.

One of the world's most horrific environmental disasters--the 1950 and 60s mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan--may have been caused by a previously unstudied form of mercury discharged directly from a chemical factory, research by the University of Saskatchewan (USask) has found.