Two things are clear from a University of Michigan analysis of nearly 200,000 Twitter posts between 2012 and 2022. One, people are really good at identifying peak pollen season. And two, liberal users on Twitter were more likely than conservatives to ascribe shifting pollen seasons over the years to climate change.

Johns Hopkins University geneticists and a small army of researchers across the country, including students, are working to catalog the vast and largely unknown soil microbiome of the United States.

Advanced quantum detectors designed at Texas A&M University are reinventing the search for dark matter, an unseen force that science has yet to explain.

Scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a new system that allows researchers to observe how plants “breathe” in real time under controlled environmental conditions. The tool, called Stomata In-Sight, integrates live confocal microscopy with leaf gas exchange measurements and precise environmental controls, enabling researchers to directly link microscopic stomatal movements with carbon dioxide uptake and water loss.

Stomata — tiny pores on leaf surfaces — play a critical role in plant growth and water use, but until now, scientists have had to choose between observing their structure or measuring their function. Stomata In-Sight overcomes this limitation, providing a dynamic view of how plants respond to changes in light, temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide.

The system could accelerate efforts to develop crops that use water more efficiently, an increasingly urgent need as drought and climate stress intensify. The research was published in Plant Physiology and was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and philanthropic funding.

Published today (Jan. 5) in Nature Geoscience, the findings suggest that this high point on the northwest section of the ice sheet is highly sensitive to the relatively mild temperatures of the Holocene, the interglacial period that began 11,000 years ago and continues today.