A flutter of blue and yellow darts through a field in late May. Trees, shrubs and summer flowers fill the landscape. A blue-winged warbler is just within reach, with one swift motion it can be gently grasped, banded and studied to understand the health and evolution of one of North America’s most colorful birds. A practice once reserved for scientists, this moment is now possible anywhere in the world thanks to a virtual reality experience developed by scientists at Penn State.    

A plant’s success may depend on how well the three sets of genetic instructions it carries in its cells cooperate, according to a new study led by plant scientists at Penn State. In an analysis of the hybrids of two crossbred tree species, the researchers found that two sets of those genes inherited from different species may not work well together, disrupting the plant’s ability to harvest light for photosynthesis and take up key nutrients. However, when the combination of inherited genes better matches up, those plants may be better able to adapt to changing environments.

The climate is changing and nowhere is it changing faster than at Earth’s poles. Researchers at Penn State have painted a comprehensive picture of the chemical processes taking place in the Arctic and found that there are multiple, separate interactions impacting the atmosphere.

UC San Diego engineers have developed a spray-on polymer coating that could help plants resist harmful bacterial infections and survive drought. Spraying just part of a leaf results in bacterial immunity and improved drought tolerance for the entire plant.

Scientists have discovered wintertime seismic activity in the ocean around Antarctica controls summer growth of phytoplankton, tiny organisms that fuel the marine food web and sequester huge amounts of carbon from Earth’s atmosphere.

Research published in Nature Communications found that the SAR11 bacteria, one of the ocean's most abundant life forms, are not a single, uniform population as often thought. Instead, they are organized into stable, ecologically distinct groups, essentially specialized "teams" adapted to specific environments, such as the coast versus the open ocean. This means that one of the ocean's most important engines is far more complex than previously known.

University of Vermont scientists developed a first-of-its-kind study that tracks thousands of generations of digital organisms replaying evolution hundreds of times. Their results were surprising. In some cases, changing the environment helped populations find higher fitness peaks; in others, it hindered them. This gives a bird’s-eye view of how evolution played out across many different environments—something that would be impossible to test in the lab. The biggest takeaway is that starting point really matters. A population’s history shapes how high it can climb and how hard the path is to get there, which means one population may not represents an entire species.

A research team at Duke University has developed a new AI framework that can uncover simple, understandable rules that govern some of the most complex dynamics found in nature and technology. The research is part of a long-term mission in Chen’s General Robotics Lab, where the team aims to develop “machine scientists” to assist automatic scientific discovery.