Yearly Archives: 2018

The genetic basis of lifespan determination is poorly understood. Most research has been done on short-lived animals, and it is unclear if these insights can be transferred to long-lived mammals like humans. By comparing genes of long- and short-lived rodents, researchers from Leibniz Institute on Aging (FLI) in Jena/Germany now identified in a collaborative project...

Emus that lived isolated on Australia's offshore islands until the 19th century, including Kangaroo Island, King Island and Tasmania, were smaller versions of their larger mainland relatives -- and their overall body size correlated to the size of the islands they inhabited.

Spring is the time of year when birds are singing throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Far to the north, beneath the ice, another lesser-known concert season in the natural world is just coming to an end.

A collaboration between astrophysicists and ecologists at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) is helping to monitor rare and endangered species and stop poaching. Astrophysical software and techniques are applied to thermal infrared imagery captured by drones to automatically detect and identify animals -- even at night, when most poaching activity occurs. The drones can survey...

In the Mackenzie Mountains of Canada, University of Kansas researcher Julien Kimmig has uncovered details of the Cambrian food web on an ocean floor that once played home to a scattering of bivalved arthropods, hyoliths and trilobites.

LSU researchers have discovered a new relationship between climate change, monarch butterflies and milkweed plants. It turns out that warming temperatures don't just affect the monarch, Danaus plexippus, directly, but also affect this butterfly by potentially turning its favorite plant food into a poison.