Earth

A collaborative group of Japanese researchers has demonstrated that the Earth's daily rotation period (24 hours) is encoded in the KaiC protein at the atomic level, a small, 10 nm-diameter biomolecule expressed in cyanobacterial cells.

The 2014-2015 flu vaccine didn't work as well compared to previous years because the H3N2 virus recently acquired a mutation that concealed the infection from the immune system. A study published on June 25 in Cell Reports reveals the major viral mutation responsible for the mismatch between the vaccine strain and circulating strains. The research will help guide the selection of viral strains for future seasonal flu vaccines.

Overexposure to sunlight, which is damaging to natural photosynthetic systems of green plants and cyanobacteria, is also expected to be damaging to artificial photosynthetic systems. Nature has solved the problem through a photoprotection mechanism called "nonphotochemical-quenching," in which excess solar energy is safely dissipated as heat from one molecular system to another. With an eye on learning from nature's success, a team of Berkeley Lab researchers has discovered a surprising key event in this energy-quenching process.

Too much male sexual attention harms attractive females, according to a new Australian and Canadian study on fruit flies.

Associate Professor Steve Chenoweth from The University of Queensland's School of Biological Sciences said the study showed that male harassment of females hampered the species' ability to adapt to new environmental conditions.

"We found that sexually attractive females were overwhelmed by male suitors," he said.

Think of an object made of iron: An I-beam, a car frame, a nail. Now imagine that half of the iron in that object owes its existence to bacteria living two and a half billion years ago.

That's the upshot of a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The findings have meaning for fields as diverse as mining and the search for life in space.

Every time you put on bug spray this summer, you're launching a strike in the ongoing war between humans and mosquitoes -- one that is rapidly driving the evolution of the pests.

Scientists studying mosquitoes in various types of environments in the United States and in Russia found that between 5 and 20 percent of a mosquito population's genome is subject to evolutionary pressures at any given time -- creating a strong signature of local adaptation to environment and humans.

Astronomers expect that galaxies grow by swallowing smaller galaxies. But the evidence is usually not easy to see -- just as the remains of the water thrown from a glass into a pond will quickly merge with the pond water, the stars in the infalling galaxy merge in with the very similar stars of the bigger galaxy leaving no trace.

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed a computer model that clarifies the complex processes driving ocean mixing in the vast eddies that swirl across hundreds of miles of open ocean.

The first species of Yeti Crab from hydrothermal vent systems of the East Scotia Ridge in the Southern Ocean, Antarctica, has been described in a study by Sven Thatje from University of Southampton, and colleagues.

The species of Yeti crab Kiwa tyleri belongs to an enigmatic group of squat lobsters, known as Kiwaidae, that thrive in the hot waters surrounding the geothermally heated hydrothermal vents. It is the dominant species at these sites, occurring at extremely high densities exceeding 700 specimens per square meter.

In the Hart-Sheldon region of Oregon and Nevada, a healthy sagebrush landscape helps support over 1,200 business, according to a new report released today which details the important contributions of sagebrush habitats to the economies of five regions across the West.

The land planarian Platydemus manokwari, or New Guinea flatworm, is a highly invasive species, already reported in many territories in the Pacific area, and as well as in France. This is the only land planarian in the '100 worst invasive alien species' list and it has now been found in additional localities including islands in the Pacific area, Puerto Rico, the first record in the Caribbean, and the first report in mainland U.S., in Florida.

A global taskforce of 174 scientists from leading research centres across 28 countries studied the link between mixtures of commonly encountered chemicals and the development of cancer. The study selected 85 chemicals not considered carcinogenic to humans and found 50 supported key cancer-related mechanisms at exposures found in the environment today.

Neandertals became extinct about 40,000 years ago but contributed on average one to three percent to the genomes of present-day Eurasians. Researchers have now analyzed DNA from a 37,000 to 42,000-year-old human mandible from Oase Cave in Romania and have found that six to nine percent of this person's genome came from Neandertals, more than any other human sequenced to date.

In a study published recently, scientists from the University of Hawai'i - Mānoa (UHM) and University of Tokyo revealed that two species of deep-sea sharks, six-gill and prickly sharks, are positively buoyant - they have to work harder to swim downward than up, and they can glide uphill for minutes at a time without using their tails.

Salmon are severely impacted by the loss of floodplain habitats near Oregon's Tillamook Bay, where nearly 90 percent of estuaries' tidal wetlands have been lost to development -- threatening the survival of coho salmon and the safety of the local community. Now, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, NOAA Fisheries, and others have come together to reduce flood risk, increase resiliency of the ecosystem, and restore salmon habitat in Tillamook Bay under the auspices of The Southern Flow Corridor project, as the proposed collaborative effort is known.