Growing beaver populations have created a large number of new habitats along rivers and ponds. Beaver dams raise the water level, enabling the dissolution of the organic carbon from the soil. From beaver ponds, carbon is released to the atmosphere. Part of the carbon settles down on the bottom, ending up used by plants or...
Goats prefer happy people
Goats can differentiate between human facial expressions and prefer to interact with happy people, according to a new study led by scientists at Queen Mary University of London.
The study, which provides the first evidence of how goats read human emotional expressions, implies that the ability of animals to perceive human facial cues is not limited...
New phase proposed in the relationship between figs and wasps
In an article published at journal Acta Oecologica, Brazilian biologist Luciano Palmieri Rocha has proposed a new phase of the development cycle of fig trees (Ficus carica) and their specific pollinators, fig wasps from the species Blastophaga psenes - one of the most studied cases when analyzing the evolution of mutualism.
According to Palmieri, the cycle's...
Remote islands harbor higher numbers of non-native species
The effects of island remoteness from the mainland on the number of species found on islands differs strongly for non-native compared to native species. Numbers of native species on islands decrease with greater remoteness, while numbers of non-native species increase. This surprising finding has been uncovered by an international research team led by Dietmar Moser,...
How eggplants became asian: Genomes and elephants tell the story
The evolutionary context of the eggplant was until recently very poorly known. Historical documents and genetic data have shown that the eggplant was first domesticated in Asia, but most of its wild relatives are from Africa. Researchers from the Natural History Museums of London (NHM) and Finland (University of Helsinki) managed to obtain the first...
Scientists identify a new kind of human brain cell
One of the most intriguing questions about the human brain is also one of the most difficult for neuroscientists to answer: What sets our brains apart from those of other animals?
"We really don't understand what makes the human brain special," said Ed Lein, Ph.D., Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. "Studying the differences...