For decades, plant breeders have worked with collapsed genome assemblies that merge two parental haplotypes into one, losing critical genetic information in the process. 

A recent study published in National Science Review has revealed that the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), traditionally regarded as a single climate mode, consists of two distinct types with different physical mechanisms and climate impacts. The findings advance the understanding of Indian Ocean variability and provide new insights into how IOD events influence regional climate.

Improving the subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) forecast skill for East Asian winter cold surges remains a grand challenge in operational meteorology. Using ECMWF hindcast data, a research team systematically identified the "high-skill windows" of week-3 cold surge forecasts. They found that a "warm-west/cold-east" sea surface temperature dipole over the mid-latitude North Pacific emerges as a consistent precursor of these windows under both El Niño and La Niña conditions, but that the dipole alone is not enough: high skill emerges only when the SST anomalies in all the key regions, including the Barents-Kara Seas, the Indian Ocean and the tropical Pacific, meet their thresholds at the same time. This makes it possible to pre-screen a subseasonal forecast's reliability before it is issued. The work was published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences.