We have long become accustomed to enjoying tomatoes, cucumbers, berries and melons year-round. In Europe, most of these imports come from Spain, where millions of tons of fruit and vegetables are grown under seas of white plastic that span the southern pa

A new study involving Christian Bartel and Jason Dunlop from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and Sonja Wedmann from the Senckenberg Forschungsstation Grube Messel describes several 48-million-year-old daddy longlegs (harvestmen) from the Messel mine near

Why do giraffes have such long necks? A study led by Penn State biologists explores how this trait might have evolved and lends new insight into this iconic question. The reigning hypothesis is that competition among males influenced neck length, but the

Nothing like the common red, black, or brown ants, a stunning blue ant has been discovered in Yingku village in Arunachal Pradesh, northeastern India. This new species belongs to the rare genus Paraparatrechina and has been named Paraparatrechina neela. T

The brain is a particularly complex organ, not only in humans. Even the brain of a fly contains more than 100,000 neurons connected by millions of synapses. For the first time, an international community of researchers has reconstructed and published all

A fungus living in the sea can break down the plastic polyethylene, provided it has first been exposed to UV radiation from sunlight. Researchers from, among others, NIOZ published their results in the journal Science of the Total Environment. They expect

Scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) have developed a new computational method for linking molecular marks on our DNA to gene activity. Their work may help researchers connect genes to the molecular "switches" that turn them on

A research team has successfully assembled a nearly gap-free, telomere-to-telomere (T2T) genome of Populus ussuriensis, filling gaps present in the P. trichocarpa genome. Leveraging long-read sequencing, the team identified and annotated centromere region

A study carried out by the University of Helsinki's DogRisk research group, the University of Eastern Finland and Wise Nose–Scent Discrimination Association in Finland investigated the threshold for scent detection in dogs.

As the demand for protein-rich food increases with population growth and rising awareness of nutrition and health, traditional animal and plant-based protein sources that require arable land or freshwater put significant pressure on land and resources. Th

Fossilized skin and other soft tissues are exceedingly rare, and it is only under special conditions that these rarest of fossils are preserved.

Aditya Prabhu loved eating the peaches off the tree in the backyard of his mom's house. The only problem was the plant produced only a few fruits a year because Japanese beetles in the hundreds would eat at the leaves, depleting the plant's energy to ma