Earth

Unlike ales, lager beers differ little in flavor. But now, by creating new crosses among the relevant yeasts, Kevin Verstrepen, PhD, Stijn Mertens, and their collaborators have opened up new horizons of taste. The research is published in the September 25 Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

Many tropical Pacific island nations are struggling to adapt to gradual sea level rise stemming from warming oceans and melting ice caps. Now they may also see much more frequent extreme interannual sea level swings.

Humans have been breeding crops until they're bigger and more nutritious since the early days of agriculture, but genetic manipulation isn't the only way to give plants a boost. In a review paper published on September 25 in Trends in Microbiology, two integrative biologists present how it is possible to engineer the plant soil microbiome to improve plant growth, even if the plants are genetically identical and cannot evolve.

These artificially selected microbiomes, which can also be selected in animals, can then be passed on from parents to offspring.

A new analysis leads the authors to advance the belief that viruses are living entities that share a long evolutionary history with cells, based on a method for tracing viral evolution back to a time when neither viruses nor cells existed in the forms recognized today.

Black rice has a rich cultural history; called "Forbidden" or "Emperor's" rice, it was reserved for the Emperor in ancient China and used as a tribute food. In the time since, it remained popular in certain regions of China and recently has become prized worldwide for its high levels of antioxidants. Despite its long history, the origins of black rice have not been clear. Black rice cultivars are found in locations scattered throughout Asia. However, most cultivated rice (species Oryza sativa) produces white grains, and the wild relative Oryza rufipogon has red grains.

Climate-related changes in flower diversity have resulted in a decrease in the length of alpine bumble bees' tongues, a new paper in Science says, leaving these insects poorly suited to feed from and pollinate the deep flowers they were adapted to previously.

As much as 47 percent of the edible U.S. seafood supply is lost each year, mainly from consumer waste, new research from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) suggests.

A gold catalyst whose behaviour can be controlled by the addition of acid or metal ion cofactors has been designed by chemists from the University of Southampton.

Dr Steve Goldup, Associate Professor of Supramolecular Chemistry, and his team have developed a catalyst with significantly enhanced properties based on a rotaxane, in which a gold catalyst is embedded in the cavity formed by threading a ring shaped molecule around a dumbell shaped axle.

Emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels like coal, petroleum and natural gas tend to collect within Earth's atmosphere as "greenhouse gases" that are blamed for escalating global warming.

We each give off millions of bacteria from our human microbiome to the air around us every day, and that cloud of bacteria can be traced back to an individual. New research focused on the personal microbial cloud -- the airborne microbes we emit into the air -- examined the microbial connection we have with the air around us. The findings demonstrate the extent to which humans possess a unique 'microbial cloud signature'.

The worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown never should have happened, according to a new study.

Targeting sitting time, rather than physical activity, is the most effective way to reduce prolonged sitting, according to the first comprehensive review of strategies designed to reduce sitting time. The research, led by the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London, is published in the journal Health Psychology Review.

Good communication is crucial to any relationship, especially when partners are separated by distance. This also holds true for microbes in the deep sea that need to work together to consume large amounts of methane released from vents on the ocean floor. Recent work at Caltech has shown that these microbial partners can still accomplish this task, even when not in direct contact with one another, by using electrons to share energy over long distances.

Elementary and middle school students who are given at least 25 minutes to eat lunch are more likely to choose fruits and consume more of their entrees, milk, and vegetables according to a new study released in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Genetic mutations called "escape variants" in the deadly Ebola virus appear to block the ability of antibody-based treatments to ward off infection, according to a team of U.S. Army scientists and collaborators. Their findings, published online this week in the journal Cell Reports, have implications for the continued development of therapeutics to treat Ebola virus disease, which has claimed the lives of over 11,000 people in West Africa since last year.