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The discovery of yet another unique animal species from Rēkohu Chatham Islands illustrates how the physical qualities of an animal are influenced by its surroundings. New research led by the University of Otago – Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka describes a new, extinct shelduck whose ancestors arrived on the islands 390,000 years ago. While this may seem…

Malcolm Prior and Jenny Kumah BBC News rural affairs team BBC/Malcolm Prior Some farmers in the driest parts of the UK are finding their broccoli yields are down more than half Farmers in the driest parts of the UK are facing some of their worst ever harvests as the heatwave continues to hit crop and…

Roughly two-thirds of all emissions of atmospheric methane — a highly potent greenhouse gas that is warming planet Earth — come from microbes that live in oxygen-free environments like wetlands, rice fields, landfills and the guts of cows. Tracking atmospheric methane to its specific sources and quantifying their importance remains a challenge, however. Scientists are…

Researchers at Tampere University and their collaborators from Germany and India have experimentally confirmed that angular momentum is conserved when a single photon is converted into a pair – validating a key principle of physics at the quantum level for the first time. This breakthrough opens new possibilities for creating complex quantum states useful in…

Researchers in Japan have genetically transferred a unique courtship behavior from one fruit fly species to another. By turning on a single gene in insulin-producing neurons, the team successfully made a species of fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) perform a gift-giving ritual it had never done before. The study, published in the journal Science, represents the…

In a new study led by Oxford University’s Department of Chemistry, chemists have demonstrated the synthesis of a cyclocarbon that is stable enough for spectroscopic characterisation in solution at room temperature. nough to be studied in liquid solution form at room temperature. The study – only the second example of a new type of molecular…

Researchers at Columbia Engineering have built a cancer therapy that makes bacteria and viruses work as a team. In a study published recently in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the Synthetic Biological Systems Lab shows how their system hides a virus inside a tumor-seeking bacterium, smuggles it past the immune system, and unleashes it inside cancerous tumors. The…