It’s a big week for CRISPR! Despite being a world apart, two separate research groups had the same idea: to see if CRISPR gene editing can really mimic conventional plant breeding.
One group re-domesticated a wild tomato plant; the other used a similar approach to domesticate an entirely new crop: the ground cherry, a tomato relative.
Together, the new work demonstrates how dramatically gene editing technology could speed up crop improvement efforts worldwide.
How to Make a Crop Worth ...read more
Researchers have taught a population of wild sparrows to sing a different song.
Out today in Current Biology, the research suggests new answers to the question of how birds learn to sing.
“This was a risky experiment we conducted because we didn’t know if it was going to work,” says Dan Mennill, lead author of the study.
Mennill explains that song learning has been studied for years in controlled laboratory settings. But it’s much more difficult to run an experime ...read more
It's not easy being a bee these days. Apis mellifera, the Western honey bee, is crucial to agriculture worldwide but faces a growing number of pests and pathogens against which beekeepers have few weapons.
But the bees themselves may be showing us the way forward: New research suggests the foraging insects may obtain protection against some viruses by consuming fungi, then returning to the hive to spread its medicinal value.
Honey bees contribute more than $15 billion annually to U.S ...read more
At vast cosmic distances, supermassive black holes called quasars gobble up matter into accretion disks that shine so brightly, they overpower the light from entire galaxies. Closer to home, compact objects called microquasars give astronomers a scaled-down taste of the processes at work inside the faraway behemoths. Now, an international collaboration of researchers has announced in the journal Nature that they’ve detected the first gamma-ray signal from the ends of the two jets spewing o ...read more
The Milky Way is apparently a hotspot for stars immigrating from other galaxies.
In a new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a trio of astronomers set out to find hypervelocity stars fleeing our galaxy, but surprisingly discovered most of the rapidly moving stars are actually barreling into the Milky Way from galaxies beyond.
"Rather than flying away from the [Milky Way's] Galactic Center, most of the high velocity stars we spotted seem to be racing ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine