A mountain chickadee waking up in the Sierra Nevada range on a snowy morning has no time to dawdle. Weighing about as much as a pencil, it needs to find…
Category: Life
Hannah Carle | Trait variation driven by tree size more than environment and shows limited translation to species vital rates – Functional Ecologists
In this ‘Behind the Paper’ blog post, author Hannah Carle – a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University – discusses the article “Trait…
A choir of katydid ancestors filled the Jurassic rainforest with song
A symphony of insect songs rang through the Jurassic rainforest, and scientists have now found the traces of this ancient soundscape. Based on an analysis of fossilized katydid ancestors, the…
Was the ‘American cheetah’ a cheetah at all?
Tens of thousands of years ago, a long-legged cat nicknamed the “American cheetah” prowled North America. But an analysis of the cat family tree reveals this cheetah’s closest living relatives…
Li Zhang | More than a fertilizer: How nitrogen changes coexistence between wheat and weeds – Functional Ecologists
In this blog post, author Li Zhang – a an Associate Professor at Nanjing Forestry University – discusses the paper “Nitrogen fertilization promotes wheat–weed coexistence through niche differentiation and fitness…
How climate change could impact food safety
Climate change isn’t just fueling stronger storms and longer droughts — it’s also making the food on your plate riskier, as Popular Mechanics’ Darren Orf reports. A new review from researchers at…
How Severe Illness During Pregnancy Alters Fetal Brain Development
Summary: Researchers have discovered that maternal immune activation during pregnancy alters the epigenome of fetal brain cells, disrupting deep-layer neurons and increasing the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders like autism. Key…
Politicizing science: Trump’s pick to head the FDA—Heidi Overton— promotes an ‘alternative system’ of ‘conservative-based science’
President Trump’s nominee to run the Food and Drug Administration once called for conservatives to build their own scientific journals and steer research funding toward right-wing policy goals, as Scientific American’s…
These worms move faster when you give them less space
For humans, running across an open field is usually a faster way to cross it than crawling through an underground tunnel. But things are different for tiny worms. They squeeze…
