Dried fruit is a tasty snack or sweet addition to recipes, but the water removal process often requires heat and energy. In a step toward more sustainable food preservation, researchers reporting in ACS Food Science & Technology have developed a method for drying food at room temperature by adjusting air pressure conditions and using food-safe calcium chloride.

Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have identified more than 200 strategies used by bacteria to avoid viral infection. Their findings, published in Cell Host & Microbe, shed light on a microbial "arms race" that could lead to new approaches to fighting infectious bacteria.

Despite the fact that much of the current research in paleontology focuses on trying to find traces of organic remains in fossils, dinosaur DNA has unfortunately never been recovered.

In 2022, numerous countries signed the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) with the goal of halting and reversing biodiversity loss. Among other things, the framework sets out various targets to be implemented by the signatory states in their national legislation. A core component is the commitment to put at least 30% of the world's land and oceans areas under protection by 2030.

To help manage agricultural practices with fewer or no pesticides, University of Michigan researchers say they need to understand how ecological systems work on agricultural lands.

In recent decades, the use of video datasets such as wildlife cameras or lab videos has become one of the most important tools for the study of animal behavior. These datasets help researchers make behavioral observations by capturing detailed and real-time data that can be analyzed repeatedly, allowing for quantitative analyses of movements, interactions and patterns, tracking, and behavioral classifications.

Maine's coastal communities have been hooked on the Atlantic bluefin tuna since at least the late 1880s—first as bycatch, until the 1930s when the fish became a prized target in fishing tournaments. Through the subsequent decades, bluefin tuna have and continue to support working waterfronts in Maine and beyond.

Moose are on the loose in the southern Rockies.

An international team of paleontologists has spent more than 15 years excavating and studying fossils from Africa to expand our understanding of the Permian, a period of Earth's history that began 299 million years ago and ended 252 million years ago with our planet's largest and most devastating mass extinction.

Antimicrobial resistance is a lurking threat in hospitals around the world. As more strains of bacteria and other microbes evolve defenses against available drugs, more patients run the risk of contracting infections that defy treatment.

A research team at McMaster University has discovered a new drug class that could someday lead to breakthrough treatments for dangerous fungal infections. The new molecules, dubbed coniotins, were isolated from a plant-dwelling fungus called Coniochaeta hoffmannii—the samples of which were collected from the McMaster Biology Greenhouse, located on the university's campus.

A new study reveals how Lactococcus lactis (L. lactis), a common food bacterium, regulates the production of a key precursor in vitamin K₂ (menaquinone) biosynthesis. The bacteria produce enough of this precursor to support their growth while preventing toxic buildup.

Unless one is a trained fighter jet pilot, or a Formula 1 driver, humans tend not to do well at higher gravity, but tiny green moss plants seem to thrive under such conditions.

Tile drainage is a common practice used in agricultural fields to remove excess water, but it also transports harmful nutrients into water bodies, contributing to algal blooms that deprive aquatic life of oxygen. Woodchip bioreactors are an efficient way to reduce nitrogen pollution by treating the water as it exits the field. However, these denitrifying bioreactors may leach phosphorus from the woodchips into the environment.

Pollinators play a vital role in fertilizing flowers, which grow into seeds and fruits and underpin our agriculture. But climate change can cause a mismatch between plants and their pollinators, affecting where they live and what time of year they're active. This has happened before.

Fossils are the backbone—oftentimes literally—of researching the far past. And because most of human evolution took place throughout Africa, the fossils the continent holds are vital to piecing together early human history. The fossils there also tell other stories of ancient ecological history, and how humans fit into the lives of the animals and plants around them.

One-third of shark species are at risk of extinction, yet scientists still lack basic data on their habitats, populations, and trends. To solve this, researchers at Virginia Tech, Stanford University, and others are building the world's largest open database of shark sightings using online photos called sharkPulse.

A new scientific paper reveals that many predictions about the future of coral reefs under climate change may be missing a crucial piece of the puzzle.

The Japanese rhinoceros beetle, Trypoxylus dichotomus, is a large insect native to Asia, characterized by the large horn of the male.

New research, published in The Journal of Immunology, discovered that a parasitic worm suppresses neurons in the skin to evade detection. The researchers suggest that the worm likely evolved this mechanism to enhance its own survival, and that the discovery of the molecules responsible for the suppression could aid in the development of new painkillers.

In order to fulfill their many functions, proteins must be folded into the correct shape. Researchers at the University of Basel have now discovered tiny "folding factories" in cells that enable efficient and accurate protein folding. A lack of these structures can lead to diseases such as diabetes and neurodegenerative disorders.

Bird populations in the tropics have dropped by roughly a third (25–38%) since 1980 due to intensifying heat extremes, compared to a world without climate change, with some species having declined in abundance by over 50%, according to a study published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution with contributions from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), the University of Queensland and Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).

Near the bottom of a shady hillside in Jericho, a lone beech tree stretches high into the canopy, a relic of a bygone forest. Through luck or (hopefully) genetics, this mighty tree has avoided contracting beech bark disease—a fatal fungal pathogen that has proven deadly to mature beech trees. And it stands just outside a hotspot where a new pathogen called beech leaf disease (BLD) is spreading across Vermont forests.

To study growth-defense trade-offs in the context of metabolism in crops, scientists from the Universities of Potsdam and Erlangen, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, and the National Institute of Biology, Ljubljana, have generated the genome-scale metabolic model potato-GEM. The first large-scale metabolic reconstruction of its kind presents a useful resource to breed plant varieties with improved stress tolerance and high yields in the future.

Western tent caterpillars might not be on your mind every year, but during their peak outbreaks, they're impossible to ignore—hairy larvae wriggling across roads and swarms of caterpillars climbing houses to form yellow silken cocoons.