Rober Sanders, UC Berkeley | March 23, 2021 California’s restrictions on vehicle emissions have been so effective that in at least one urban area, Los Angeles, the most concerning source of dangerous aerosol pollution may well be trees and other green plants, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, chemists. Aerosols — particles of hydrocarbons ... Continue Reading »
Science + Environment
We’re surprisingly similar to Earth’s first animals, research says
By Jules Bernstein, UC Riverside | March 18, 2021 The earliest multicellular organisms may have lacked heads, legs, or arms, but pieces of them remain inside of us today, new research shows. According to a UC Riverside study, 555-million-year-old oceanic creatures from the Ediacaran period share genes with today’s animals, including humans. “None of them had heads or ... Continue Reading »
Loss of variation within species amounts to a hidden biodiversity crisis
By Tim Stephens, UC Santa Cruz | March 1, 2021 The rapid loss of variation within species is a hidden biodiversity crisis, according to the authors of a new study looking at how this variation supports essential ecological functions and the benefits nature provides for people. Published March 1 in Nature Ecology and Evolution, the study highlights the need to better ... Continue Reading »
Northern California kelp forest collapse will be hard to reverse
By Tim Stephens, UC Santa Cruz | March 5, 2021 Satellite imagery shows that the area covered by kelp forests off the coast of Northern California has dropped by more than 95 percent, with just a few small, isolated patches of bull kelp remaining. Species-rich kelp forests have been replaced by “urchin barrens,” where purple sea urchins cover a seafloor devoid of kelp and ... Continue Reading »
Protein discovery could help enable eco-friendly fungicides
By Jules Bernstein, UC Riverside | March 3, 2021 New research reveals an essential step in scientists’ quest to create targeted, more eco-friendly fungicides that protect food crops. Scientists have known for decades that biological cells manufacture tiny, round structures called extracellular vesicles. However, their pivotal roles in communication between invading ... Continue Reading »
Poking the paradigm
By Harrison Tasoff, UC Santa Barbara | February 17, 2021 Deprive a mountain range of its wolves, and soon the burgeoning deer population will strip its slopes bare. “I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer,” wrote ecologist Aldo Leopold in his landmark 1949 title “A Sand County ... Continue Reading »
Our earliest primate ancestors rapidly spread after dinosaur extinction
By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley | February 24, 2021 The small, furry ancestors of all primates — a group that includes humans and other apes — were already taking to the trees a mere 100,000 years after the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs and most other terrestrial animals, according to a new analysis of fossil teeth in the collections of the University of ... Continue Reading »
Binary stars are all around us, new map of solar neighborhood shows
By Robert Sanders, UC Berkeley | February 22, 2021 The latest star data from the Gaia space observatory has for the first time allowed astronomers to generate a massive 3D atlas of widely separated binary stars within about 3,000 light years of Earth — 1.3 million of them. The one-of-a-kind atlas, created by Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysics Ph.D. student from the ... Continue Reading »
Genetic tool could improve monitoring of marine protected areas
Sonia Aronson, UC Los Angeles | February 24, 2021 Researchers used to need to scuba dive to find out which fish live in any given area of the ocean. Now, a new UCLA study has found that environmental DNA, or eDNA, can be used to identify marine organisms living in a certain space. Environmental DNA is the term for the DNA from cells that are constantly released ... Continue Reading »
Parasitic plants conspire to keep hosts alive
By Jules Bernstein, UC Riverside | February 23, 2021 The plant that encourages kissing at Christmas is in fact a parasite, and new research reveals mistletoe has an unusual feeding strategy. Like other plants, mistletoe is capable of using sunlight to create its own food, a process called photosynthesis. However, it prefers to siphon water and nutrients from other trees ... Continue Reading »