Wearing waders and work gloves, three dozen employees from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service stood at a small creek amid the dry sagebrush of southeastern Idaho.…
Category: Life
Fungi may be crucial to storing carbon in soil as the Earth warms
When it comes to storing carbon in the ground, fungi may be key. Soils are a massive reservoir of carbon, holding about three times as much carbon as Earth’s atmosphere.…
A sailor’s story captures the impact of rising serious fungal infections
Tyson Bottenus once captained an 80-foot schooner called the Aquidneck. He sailed tourists off the coast of Newport, R.I., discussing the area’s history and sites. In January 2018, he had…
By taking on poliovirus, Marguerite Vogt transformed the study of all viruses
When nobody else wanted the job, Marguerite Vogt stepped in. Working from early morning until late at night in a small, isolated basement laboratory at the California Institute of Technology,…
A bacteria-virus arms race could lead to a new way to treat shigellosis
When some bacteria manage to escape being killed by a virus, the microbes end up hamstringing themselves. And that could be useful in the fight to treat infections. The bacterium…
2021 research reinforced that mating across groups drove human evolution
Evidence that cross-continental Stone Age networking events powered human evolution ramped up in 2021. A long-standing argument that Homo sapiens originated in East Africa before moving elsewhere and replacing Eurasian…
Gut bacteria let vulture bees eat rotting flesh without getting sick
Mention foraging bees and most people will picture insects flitting from flower to flower in search of nectar. But in the jungles of Central and South America, “vulture bees” have…
‘Life as We Made It’ charts the past and future of genetic tinkering
Life as We Made ItBeth ShapiroBasic Books, $30 With genetic engineering, humans have recently unleashed a surreal fantasia: pigs that excrete less environment-polluting phosphorus, ducklings hatched from chicken eggs, beagles…
Are viruses alive, not alive or something in between? And why does it matter?
Villain. Killer. Menace. Since 2020, scientists and public officials have used these words to describe SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. News articles, research papers and tweets repeatedly personify the…
A hit of dopamine sends mice into dreamland
A quick surge of dopamine shifts mice into a dreamy stage of sleep. In the rodents’ brains, the chemical messenger triggers rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, researchers report in the March…
