#biological-integration

#biological-integration

During major floods, thousands of tiny fish convene at Luvilombo Falls in the upper Congo River Basin to undertake a peculiar vertical migration, described for the first time today in Scientific Reports.

Modern scientific societies are increasingly vulnerable due to their dependence on membership fees and journal subscriptions, which are being challenged by the rise of virtual networking and open-access publishing.

A study by researchers at the University of California Berkeley has found that ethanol is surprisingly common in floral nectar, the sugary fuel that keeps pollinators alive. Yeast feeding on those sugars produces trace amounts of alcohol, and in this study, it showed up in 26 of the 29 plant species sampled.

Few transformations in the history of life have been as extreme as the embrace of the ocean by seagrass. Like whales and dolphins, modern seagrasses descend from land-dwelling ancestors.

Risks of outbreaks with pandemic potential rise with increasing land-use change, biodiversity loss and climate change. The Pandemic Agreement adopted by the World Health Assembly in 2025 marks a historic shift that establishes the One Health approach as a legally binding obligation for pandemic prevention.

Climate breakdown is occurring more rapidly with the heating rate almost doubling, according to research that excludes the effect of natural factors behind the latest scorching temperatures. It found global heating accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35C per decade over the past 10 years.

I'll be talking about holistic engineering or the practice of factoring in your technical decisions, designs, strategies, all the non-technical factors that are actually forces that influence your organic socio-technical problem space. As much as you can see in this canyon how natural forces have influenced the shape of the earth, so you can see the color. You can see all the different layers.

Biology is undergoing a transformation. After centuries of studying life as it evolves naturally, researchers are now using a combination of computation and genome engineering to intervene, generating new proteins and even whole bacteria from scratch. The use of artificial-intelligence tools to design biological components, an approach known as generative biology, is set to turbocharge this area of research. Just last year, scientists used AI-assisted design to produce artificial genes that can be expressed in mammalian cells.

To capture the biological impact of this extreme environment, I used a comprehensive suite of sensors and biomarker analyses. I wore a wireless electroencephalograph (EEG) system to monitor brain activity, sleep stages and neural signatures of stress and adaptation; the Oura Ring to continuously track sleep patterns, heart-rate variability and circadian-rhythm shifts; and the glucose monitor to follow metabolic responses in real time.

In Indra's Net of pearls and jewels, every gem reflects every other, a shimmering image of interdependence. This ancient Vedic metaphor for connection across the cosmos also illuminates what the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht first proposed in 2014as 'theSymbiocene': the era after the Anthropocene, in which human technologies take their cues from living systems and work in partnership rather than through dominance.

When British author Karen Armstrong won the TED prize in 2008, she used the money to convene a group of religious thinkers from a wide range of faiths to craft an updated version of the Golden Rule for the 21st century. What emerged was the Charter for Compassion, which calls on people around the world "to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and put another there, and to honor the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect."

Mold is a perennial scourge in museums that can disfigure and destroy art and artifacts. To keep this microbial foe in check, institutions follow protocols designed to deter the familiar fungi that thrive in humid settings. But it seems a new front has opened in this long-standing battle. I'd recently heard rumblings that curators in my then home base of Denmark have been wrestling with perplexing infestations that seem to defy the normal rules of engagement.

Signs of ageing accelerated when fish were exposed to the chemicals, according to the study, which could have implications for other organisms. Chemical safety regulations tend to focus on short-term exposure to high doses of pesticides and other chemicals, but the study focused on long-term exposure. Low doses of pesticides are widespread in the environment, so their effects should be studied and understood, the authors said.

His message is clear: our world is built on abundant energy, around 80% of which has come from fossil fuels over the past 50 years. Because supplies are limited, energy consumption will peak in decades - sooner if humans attempt to limit climate change. To keep global warming below 1.5 °C by 2100, the use of fossil fuels must fall by 5-8% each year - a pace that is too fast for low-carbon energy to keep up with.

The world spends 30 times more money destroying nature than protecting it. That's according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) that exposes a massive gulf between so-called "harmful investments" and financing that promotes nature preservation. The global environment agency's latest "State of Finance for Nature" (SNF) report is calling to phase out the US$7.3 trillion (6.2 trillion) in global investments that damage nature including into high-emissions energy infrastructure and manufacturing, for example.

It's a plant! It's a fungus! It's... an entirely new type of lifeform hitherto unknown to science? That appears to be the case for a puzzling, spire-shaped organism that lived over 400 million years ago, according to a new study published in the journal Science Advances. After analyzing its internal structures, the authors argue that the mystifying ancient beings known as prototaxites don't belong to any of the existing biological kingdoms.

Sometime in the late 1990s, an adult ribbon worm was scooped up from the murk in the waters off the San Juan Islands, in the Pacific Northwest. He was moved to a tank along with a smattering of other invertebrates, including two vermilion bat stars and approximately 30 beige peanut worms. In the years since, the worm has been transported across the country to Virginia, where he lives now.