I’m not going to tell you how that headline relates to this week’s science stories, however the bold I added in the quoted text will clue you in. I didn’t collect stories to fit this theme, I saw the theme within the stories I collected.
"A large number of studies have looked at how fire affects plants, or how fire affects animals. But what is largely understudied is the question of how fire affects both, and about how linkages within those ecological networks might respond to fire disturbance," said Jonathan Myers, associate professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, a co-author of the study. [...]
At the sites they compared, the scientists found that the number of individual bees, flies and butterflies -- and the flowering plants they frequent -- were higher in parts of the landscape that had burned, as opposed to those that hadn't burned.
However, increases were greater in areas that had experienced mixed-severity wildfire, which leaves some vegetation intact in a mosaic of habitat types, as opposed to high-severity wildfire, which largely removes all vegetation and can damage the soil and seed bank.
For example, flowering-plant abundances increased more than 10-fold in mixed-severity wildfire and more than nine-fold in high-severity wildfire compared with unburned areas. Overall the researchers identified 329 pollinator species and 193 flowering-plant species.
"Oftentimes, the public perception about fire in general is that it is bad. But it was impressive how much higher the abundances of both plants and pollinators were -- as well as the number of species -- in the burned landscapes compared with the unburned landscapes," Myers said.
A well-known leaf-cutting ant grows its own body armour using biominerals, a protective power previously unknown in the insect world, scientists have discovered in research published Tuesday showing this makes the ants almost unbeatable in battle.
Biomineral armour is seen in the natural world in crustaceans like lobsters as well as in other marine animals—sea urchin spines contain calcium carbonate for example—but it has not previously been found in insects.
Researchers stumbled across the discovery while investigating the relationship between the fungus-growing ant species Acromyrmex echinatior and antibiotic-producing bacteria that helps them protect their crops.
Now do us —> humans have a near-zebra-finch capacity for language mapping.
If songbirds could appear on "The Masked Singer" reality TV competition, zebra finches would likely steal the show. That's because they can rapidly memorize the signature sounds of at least 50 different members of their flock, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley.
In findings recently published in the journal Science Advances, these boisterous, red-beaked songbirds, known as zebra finches, have been shown to pick one another out of a crowd (or flock) based on a particular peer's distinct song or contact call.
Like humans who can instantly tell which friend or relative is calling by the timbre of the person's voice, zebra finches have a near-human capacity for language mapping. Moreover, they can remember each other's unique vocalizations for months and perhaps longer, the findings suggest.
"The amazing auditory memory of zebra finches shows that birds' brains are highly adapted for sophisticated social communication," said study lead author Frederic Theunissen, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology, integrative biology and neuroscience.
We know that carbon dioxide is a major driver of climate change, so the more that can be taken out of the atmosphere by plants, the better. With the warmer climate leading to a longer growing season, some researchers have suggested that more carbon dioxide would be absorbed by trees and other plants than in previous times. But a new study has turned this theory on its head and could have profound effects on how we adapt to climate change. [...]
Using data from the Pan European PhenologyProject, which has tracked some trees for as long as 65 years, the researchers found in their long-term observational study that as the rate of photosynthesis increased, leaves changed colour and fell earlier in the year. For every 10% increase in photosynthetic activity over the spring and summer growing season, trees shed their leaves, on average, eight days earlier.
There are few things on the island of Hawaii that are more valuable than fresh water. This is not because the island is dry. There is plenty of rain. The trouble is that there is tremendous demand for this water and much of it that does accumulate on the island’s surface disappears before it can be used.
New research by marine geophysicists reveals that underground rivers running off the large island’s western coast are a key force behind this vanishing act. [...]
“Everyone assumed that this missing fresh water was seeping out at the coastline or traveling laterally along the island,” said Eric Attias, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii, who led the new study published Wednesday in Science Advances.
Dr. Attias’ work shows that within the rock of the island below the waves, there are underground rivers of fresh water flowing 2-½ miles out into the ocean. These rivers are flowing through fractured volcanic rock and surrounded by porous rocks that are saturated with salt water. Between all of this salt water and the flowing fresh water are thin layers of rock formed from compacted ash and soil that appear to be impermeable and thus keeping the two types of water separated. In total, these rivers appear to contain enough fresh water to fill about 1.4 million Olympic swimming pools.
The Swiss research team shows that acute concentrations of fine particles, especially those smaller than 2.5 micrometers, cause inflammation of the respiratory, pulmonary and cardiovascular tracts and thicken the blood. “In combination with a viral infection, these inflammatory factors can lead to a serious progression of the disease. Inflammation also promotes the attachment of the virus to cells,” he says. In addition, the coronavirus may also be transported by the fine particles. “This has already been demonstrated for influenza and an Italian study found coronavirus RNA on fine particles. All this remains to be demonstrated, of course, but it is a likely possibility,” adds Rohrer.
New research has identified and described a cellular process that, despite what textbooks say, has remained elusive to scientists until now - precisely how the copying of genetic material that, once started, is properly turned off.
The finding concerns a key process essential to life: the transcription phase of gene expression, which enables cells to live and do their jobs. [...]
"We started studying Rho, and realized it cannot possibly work in ways people tell us it works," said Irina Artsimovitch, co-lead author of the study and professor of microbiology at The Ohio State University.
The research, published online by the journal Science today, Nov. 26, 2020, determined that instead of attaching to a specific piece of RNA near the end of transcription and helping it unwind from DNA, Rho actually "hitchhikes" on RNA polymerase for the duration of transcription. Rho cooperates with other proteins to eventually coax the enzyme through a series of structural changes that end with an inactive state enabling release of the RNA.
In order for wind energy to be useful—and accepted—researchers need to design systems that are both efficient and inexpensive, Naughton said. That means gaining a better understanding of the physical phenomena that govern wind turbines, at all scales. Three years ago, the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) brought together 70 experts from around the world to discuss the state of the science. In 2019, the group published grand scientific challenges that need to be addressed for wind energy to contribute up to half of the demand for power.
One of those challenges was to better understand the physics of the part of the atmosphere where the turbines operate. "Wind is really an atmospheric fluid mechanics problem," said Naughton. "But how the wind behaves at the levels where the turbines operate is still an area where we need more information." [...]
The advantage to building bigger turbines is that a wind power plant would need fewer machines to build and maintain and to access the powerful winds high above the ground. But giant power plants function at a scale that hasn't been well-studied, said Veers. [...]
He called wind energy the "ultimate scale problem." Because it connects small-scale problems like the interactions of turbines with the air to giant-scale problems like atmospheric modeling, wind energy will require expertise and input from a variety of fields to address the challenges. "Wind is among the cheapest forms of energy," said Naughton. "But as the technology matures, the questions get harder."
Writing in Nature, the Borexino Collaboration1 reports results that blast past a milestone in neutrino physics. They have detected solar neutrinos produced by a cycle of nuclear-fusion reactions known as the carbon–nitrogen–oxygen (CNO) cycle. Measurements of these neutrinos have the potential to resolve uncertainties about the composition of the solar core, and offer crucial insights into the formation of heavy stars.
Neutrinos are tiny, subatomic particles. They were first postulated to exist by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930, to account for the energy that was apparently missing during β-decay, a process in which energetic electrons are emitted from an atomic nucleus. The presence of a massless particle that could carry any fraction of the energy from the decay would explain why the spectrum of emitted electron energies is continuous. Pauli’s explanation for why neutrinos had never been observed was that they interact incredibly weakly with matter. Subsequent decades of research have yielded a wealth of information about Pauli’s ‘ghost particle’, including the Nobel-prizewinning discovery that neutrinos do, in fact, have a mass2–4, albeit one so small as to be beyond the reach of current measurements.
Whew, good to know
A hungry brain craves food. A lonely brain craves people. After spending a day completely isolated from anyone else, people’s brains perked up at the sight of social gatherings, like a hungry person’s brain seeing food, scientists report November 23 in Nature Neuroscience.
Cognitive neuroscientist Livia Tomova, then at MIT, and her colleagues had 40 participants fast for 10 hours. At the end of the day, certain nerve cells in the midbrain fired up in response to pictures of pizza and chocolate cake. Those neurons — in the substantia nigra pars compacta and ventral tegmental area — produce dopamine, a chemical messenger associated with reward (SN: 8/27/15). [...]
In people who reported that they were generally more lonely, the social responses were blunted. “We don’t really know what causes that,” Tomova says. “Maybe being isolated doesn’t really affect them as much, because it’s something that is not that different, perhaps, from their everyday life.”
biodiversity is your perfect excuse for not raking those leaves!