News by Subject Biology

Researchers from FSU's Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science suggest that projected increases in air temperatures, rainfall inundation and blistering solar radiation could significantly reduce hawksbill hatching success at a selection of major nesting beaches.

Hundreds of dams are being proposed for Mekong River basin in Southeast Asia. The negative social and environmental consequences -- affecting everything from food security to the environment -- greatly outweigh the positive changes of this grand-scale flood control, according to new research by Michigan State University.

Pulling off a Band-Aid may soon get a lot less painful. Researchers from Harvard and Xi'an Jiaotong University in China have developed a new type of adhesive that can strongly adhere wet materials -- such as hydrogel and living tissue -- and be easily detached with a specific frequency of light. The adhesives could be used to attach and painlessly detach wound dressings, transdermal drug delivery devices, and wearable robotics.

When making sense of the massive amount of information packed into an ice core, scientists face a forensic challenge: how best to separate the useful information from the corrupt. Tools from information theory, a branch of complexity science, can quickly flag which segments, in over a million data points, require further investigation.

According to a recent study published in the journal Science Advances, air pollution not only affects air quality, but it also changes the pathways along which new particles are formed in the atmosphere.

How does a normal cell turn into a deadly cancer? Seeking an answer to this Question researchers from Charité -- Universitätsmedizin Berlin examined the tumor genomes of nearly 300 prostate cancer patients. Their findings describe the ways in which changes in the prostate cells' genetic information pave the way for cancer development. Using a newly developed computer model, it is now possible to predict the course of the disease in individual patients. The results of this study were now published in Cancer Cell.

A team of researchers led by wildlife ecologist Theresa Walter analyzed over 1,100 fox sightings made by the public as part of the citizen science project StadtWildTiere (www.stadtwildtiere.at). The joint team of researchers from the Vetmeduni Vienna and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna (BOKU) now showed that foxes prefer specific city areas and environments. The study also revealed that reports of fox sightings correlated with the educational level of the population.