Liver stage malaria parasite

Preventing Resistance By Using Scarcity To Force Pathogen Competition

Drug resistant pathogens are an ongoing plague for the medical field and efforts to find original drugs and other solutions are slow going. The past few years, however, have seen some new scientific discoveries that might finally prove to be a more long-term option to help deal with such disease-causing offenders. These contemporary options though […]

Soybeans Schoharie Crossing State Historical Site, Fort Hunter NY 2807

Nonhost Resistance Protects Soybeans From Sudden Death Syndrome

Sudden death syndrome is, as the name would suggest, a devastating disease. It first emerged in Arkansas in 1971 and has since spread across the US and even into South America by the 1990’s, causing heavy fatalities. The fungus that causes it, Fusarium virguliforme, can be considered the root of one of the most deadly […]

Insect eye

Developmental Biology Causes Extra Beetle Eyes To Form

Developmental biology can be a wild field to study. Through looking into the fundamental genes controlling body structure and the formation of the body as a whole, strange and bizarre effects can be discovered from the smallest of changes. One of the most famous being the creation of fruit flies that grow a pair of […]

Heat affected crop during a green drought

Drought Tolerance: Recent Efforts in Biotechnology

Drought continues to be a primary driver of famine and crop loss around the world, with the accompanied water shortages not only affecting food production, but also drinking water availability. It is predicted that, by 2025, over two and a half billion people will be facing those sort of water shortages, especially as the effects […]

Проводящий пучок Pteridium aquilinum

Plants Fight Flooding From Climate Change With Root Bending

Recent events shed a light on what we possibly face in the future, as hurricanes and other weather events become more severe due to the increased energy capacity of the atmosphere from greenhouse gas influx. The colloquial term for this process is climate change. And scientists are hard at work on finding ways to mitigate […]

Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden

Ethnobotany: A Primer On The Intersection Of Culture and Nature

Ethnobotany is one of those fields that encompasses more than just itself. It is larger than the sum of its parts. Connected to the wider field of ethnobiology, it relates to all of its other sister fields, like ethnoentomology, ethnozoology, and ethnomycology. And discussing just those misses out on the various other culture specific fields […]

Virus created with blender 249b 001

The Relaxed System of CRISPR-Cas10 Is Deadly To Mutated Viruses

The specificity found within the mechanisms of the CRISPR system can be both a boon and a bane. Thanks to things like the PAM sequence, CRISPR-Cas9 has found itself as a useful tool to accurately target desired gene sequences at an unparalleled level. No other gene editing technology can really come close to matching the […]

Mimulus guttatus.Phrymaceae

New Flower Developed With Evolutionary Autopolyploidy In Past 200 Years

The study of evolutionary history and how species have developed into the modern forms we know them for today has always been a continuing and ongoing process. As new knowledge on ancient and extinct species is unearthed and matched to their evolved living descendants, we are then able to further fill out the complicated pattern […]

Five weed mix

The Mechanics of Plant and Weed Mimicry: An Overview

Plant mimicry has always been a rather select field, both in nature and in scientific study, though not necessarily uncommon in the former. This selectivity is due to the fact that it serves no direct benefit in the battle between different plants for sunlight or other sorts of land superiority. Instead, before humans, mimicry of […]

Nicotiana tabacum 002

Plant Growth Is Mathematically Similar To Brain Neuron Development

Plant growth is such that plants always strive to maximize the amount of sunlight, their energy source, that is hitting their leaves at all times. Due to the often dense growing of many types of plants, it is a constant battle between them to either grow higher to overshadow the rest or seek other methods […]