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Climate change is having a dramatic impact on marine animal and plant communities but little is known of its influence on marine prokaryotes, which represent the largest living biomass in the world oceans and play a fundamental role in maintaining life on our planet.
Here we show that pollen collected by honey bee foragers in maize- and soybean-dominated landscapes is contaminated throughout the growing season with multiple agricultural pesticides, including the neonicotinoids used as seed treatments.
It comes after scientists reported that Greenland’s ice sheet has melted three months earlier than usual due to climate change.
"Something like this wipes out all kinds of records, you can't help but go, 'This could be a sign of things we're going to see more often in the future."
Nasa ice scientist Walt Meler said: "Things are getting more extreme and they're getting more common".
Economic and population growth on top of climate change could lead to serious water shortages across a broad swath of Asia by the year 2050, a newly published study by MIT scientists has found.
... Improved transposon mutagenesis methods revealed a class of quasi-essential genes that are needed for robust growth, explaining the failure of our initial design. Three cycles of design, synthesis, and testing, with retention of quasi-essential genes, produced JCVI-syn3.0 (531 kilobase pairs, 473 genes), which has a genome smaller than that of any autonomously replicating cell found in nature. JCVI-syn3.0 retains almost all genes involved in the synthesis and processing of macromolecules. Unexpectedly, it also contains 149 genes with unknown biological functions. JCVI-syn3.0 is a versatile platform for investigating the core functions of life and for exploring whole-genome design.
Bacteria isolated from outside a bottle-recycling facility can break down and metabolize plastic. The proliferation of plastics in consumer products, from bottles to clothing, has resulted in the release of countless tons of plastics into the environment.
Mi says that membranes made from graphene or graphene oxide can more effectively remove wastewater contaminants—including pharmaceuticals, pathogens and endocrine disruptors—than current methods and can be applied to wastewater reuse, water desalinization and storm water treatment.
The longstanding problem with graphene oxide membranes has been that adding oxygen makes graphene more likely to dissolve in water.
But when Mi was able to adhere a chemical to the sheets of graphene oxide to "glue" them together, the membrane stayed intact in water. The results of that breakthrough were published in a 2013 academic journal.