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 »
Science + Environment
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 »
Eavesdropping on cellular conversations
By Brian Bell, UC Irvine | February 17, 2021 An interdisciplinary team of biologists and mathematicians at the University of California, Irvine has developed a new tool to help decipher the language cells use to communicate with one another. In a paper published today in Nature Communications, the researchers introduce CellChat, a computational platform that enables ... Continue Reading »
Migratory birds track climate across the year
By Andy Fell, UC Davis | February 18, 2021 As climate change takes hold across the Americas, some areas will get wetter, and others will get hotter and drier. A new study of the yellow warbler, a widespread migratory songbird, shows that individuals have the same climatic preferences across their migratory range. The work is published Feb. 17 in Ecology ... Continue Reading »
Oldest DNA sequences reveal how mammoths evolved
By Tim Stephens, UC Santa Cruz | February 17, 2021 An international team of scientists has sequenced DNA recovered from mammoth remains as old as 1.2 million years. The analyses show that the Columbian mammoth that inhabited North America during the last ice age was a hybrid between the woolly mammoth and a previously unknown genetic lineage of mammoth. The study, ... Continue Reading »
Turtles face grim future from rising sea levels
David Colgan, UC Los Angeles | February 8, 2021 About 60% of the world’s turtle species are considered threatened or endangered, making them one of the most vulnerable groups of animals on the planet. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals new findings about turtles’ evolution so far and the tough prospects they face for ... Continue Reading »
Healthy oceans need healthy soundscapes, say marine scientists
By Tim Stephens, UC Santa Cruz Rain falls lightly on the ocean’s surface. Marine mammals chirp and squeal as they swim along. The pounding of surf along a distant shoreline heaves and thumps with metronomic regularity. These are the sounds that most of us associate with the marine environment. But this soundtrack of a healthy ocean no longer reflects the acoustic environment ... Continue Reading »
A surprising cycle
By Harrison Tasoff, UC Santa Barbara Hydrocarbons and petroleum are almost synonymous in environmental science. After all, oil reserves account for nearly all the hydrocarbons we encounter. But the few hydrocarbons that trace their origin to biological sources may play a larger ecological role than scientists originally suspected. A team of researchers at UC Santa Barbara ... Continue Reading »