Category: Interaction
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Plants. Seeing.
Plants lack eyes and ears, but they can still see, hear, smell and respond to environmental cues and dangers. They do this with the aid of hundreds of membrane proteins that sense microbes or other stresses. Researchers now have created the first network map for 200 of these proteins. The map shows how a few…
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Humans affecting the forest. Forest affecting humans.
Human biomass utilization reduces global carbon stocks in vegetation by 50%, implying that massive emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere have occurred over the past centuries and millennia. The contribution of forest management and livestock grazing on natural grasslands to global carbon losses is of similar magnitude as that of deforestation. Currently, these effects are…
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Plants “deciding”. Death and Life.
Animals facing competition have been shown to optimally choose between different behaviors, including confrontation, avoidance and tolerance, depending on the competitive ability of their opponents relative to their own. For example, if their competitors are bigger or stronger, animals are expected to “give up the fight” and choose avoidance or tolerance over confrontation. Similar responses…
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Ghost images. Glows. At the corners of the universe…
A team of physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) has used a technique known as ‘ghost imaging’ to create an image of an object from atoms that never interact with it. Lead researcher Associate Professor Andrew Truscott from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering (RSPE) said the experiment relied on correlated pairs…
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Placenta, Jokes, Interactions. Funny things…
The placenta, once thought sterile, actually harbors a world of bacteria that may influence the course of pregnancy and help shape an infant’s health and the bacterial makeup of its gut, a new study has found. The research is part of a broader scientific effort to explore the microbiome, the trillions of microbes — bacteria,…
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