How your festival wee could disrupt soil health and water quality

Aug 24, 2024 08:49 am UTC| Insights & Views Nature

Festival season is in full flow, and like any self-respecting plant-soil biogeochemist attending a local music festival, Im curious about how these outdoor events might modify important nutrient cycles. With crowds...

Could we use volcanoes to make electricity?

Aug 20, 2024 05:25 am UTC| Nature

Turning red-hot lava from an active volcano into electricity would be dangerous and unreliable. Volcanoes dont erupt on predictable schedules, and lava cools too quickly. But many countries, including the U.S., have found...

Banana apocalypse, part 2 – a genomicist explains the tricky genetics of the fungus devastating bananas worldwide

Aug 19, 2024 03:40 am UTC| Insights & Views Nature

Did you know that the bananas you eat today are not the same type as the ones people were eating a few generations ago? The banana you might have had with your breakfast today is a variety called the Cavendish banana,...

Trees compete for space, light and resources, and those clashes can leave battle scars

Aug 16, 2024 06:08 am UTC| Nature

When you walk through a forest, it may feel like a static setting where very little is happening. But trees are constantly interacting and reacting to each other as they grow. Theres intense competition for light and...

Rat poison is moving up through food chains, threatening carnivores around the world

Aug 12, 2024 10:55 am UTC| Nature

Rats thrive around humans, for good reason: They feed off crops and garbage and readily adapt to many settings, from farms to the worlds largest cities. To control them, people often resort to poisons. But chemicals that...

Good flooding? Scientists use rice cultivation to preserve soil in Florida’s Everglades Agricultural Area

Aug 09, 2024 19:09 pm UTC| Nature

Each summer, nearly 25,000 acres (10,000 hectares) of rice is cultivated in the Florida Everglades Agricultural Area, a roughly 1,100-square-mile (2,800-square-kilometer) area south of Lake Okeechobee. Farming here...

Our lakes are teeming with parasites. Why that’s good…and bad

Aug 08, 2024 14:30 pm UTC| Nature

If youre a fishing enthusiast, you may have already noticed abnormalities or parasites in the wild fish you catch. In fact, the fish we commonly find in our lakes, such as bass or trout, harbour several species of...