Septoria brown spot may be the common cold of soybean diseases, but that doesn't mean it's entirely benign. The ubiquitous fungal disease can cause 10 to 27% yield loss, according to University of Illinois research. For many farmers, the obvious response is to fight back with fungicide, but a new U of I study shows Septoria can actually increase after fungicide application.

New evidence has emerged that an invasive species of malaria-carrying mosquito from Asia is spreading in Africa, where it could pose a "unique" threat to tens of millions of city-dwellers, researchers warned Tuesday.

Russia on Tuesday dispatched one of six giant magnets needed for the ITER nuclear fusion program in France, one of the last international scientific projects Moscow participates in despite the Ukraine conflict.

Hurricane Ian not only ravaged southwest Florida on land but was destructive underwater as well. It destroyed man-made reefs and brought along red tide, the harmful algae blooms that kill fish and birds, according to marine researchers who returned last week from a six-day cruise organized by the Florida Institute of Oceanography.

Working in teeny tiny worms, scientists can now test the effects of thousands of genetic mutations in one fell swoop.

When people talk about adapting to climate change, they often refer to innovations—a new crop variety that can withstand more extreme heat or building underwater pumps to cool coral reefs. But Gary Lyn, an assistant professor who specializes in international trade and economic geography at Iowa State University, says trade, migration and job options will also affect how individual states and...

Polymers are lightweight, durable, and easily processed into fabricated parts, features that promoted polymers to become the most relevant class of engineering materials by volume. However, recycling polymers is a challenge that materials scientists have been researching for decades.

When it comes to the biological imperatives of survival and reproduction, nature often finds a way—sometimes more than one way. For a species of flycatcher in the remote Solomon Islands, scientists have so far found at least two genetic pathways leading to the same physical outcome: all-black feathers. This change was no random accident. It was a result of nature specifically selecting for this...

A significant reduction in childhood poverty could cut criminal convictions by almost a quarter, according to a study conducted in Brazil. An article on the study is published in Scientific Reports. The researchers used an innovative approach involving an analysis of 22 risk factors that affect human development and interviews with 1,905 children at two points—a first interview to form a...

Nature seems to have an inexhaustible supply of inspiration when it comes to butterflies. With over 18,000 species, each with a unique geometry and color combination, butterflies look as though they're trying their best to imitate a sunbeam that crossed paths with a prism.

Bats help keep forests growing. Without bats to hold their populations in check, insects that munch on tree seedlings go wild, doing three to nine times more damage than when bats are on the scene. That's according to a new study from the University of Illinois. The article, "Bats reduce insect density and defoliation in temperate forests: an exclusion experiment," is published inEcology.

In science, no matter what the field, expertise often intersects. At the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), this is especially true for many areas of study where faculty members collaborate to push the limits of a specific field that much farther. And it's equally true for a team led by Professor Andreas Ruediger, which has brought together specialists from several different...

As Hurricane Fiona made landfall as a Category 1 storm in Puerto Rico on Sept. 18, 2022, some areas of the island were inundated with nearly 30 inches of rain, and power to hundreds of thousands of homes was knocked out. Only 10 days later, Hurricane Ian, a Category 4 storm and one of the strongest and most damaging storms on record, landed in Lee County, Florida, leveling homes and flooding...

For many decades, it's been known that communities of color are exposed to more air pollution than their predominantly white counterparts.

Inside tiny cellular machines called ribosomes, chains of genetic material called messenger RNAs (mRNAs) are matched with the corresponding transfer RNAs (tRNAs) to create sequences of amino acids that exit the ribosome as proteins. Unfinished proteins are called nascent chains, and they are left attached to the ribosome.

Scientists have made a significant step towards building the world's first digital plant by developing a sophisticated computational model which has also solved one of the most enduring plant science mysteries—the role of the biological clock.

Microorganisms are essential for normal social development in zebrafish via their influence on pruning of neural connections in the developing brain, according to a study publishing November 1st in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Joseph Bruckner at the University of Oregon, US, and colleagues.

Reproduction permanently alters females' bones in ways not previously known, a team of anthropologists has found. Its discovery, based on an analysis of primates, sheds new light on how giving birth can permanently change the body.

Two newly developed, low-cost tests that use nanoparticles to detect chemicals can accurately measure tiny amounts of two potentially harmful herbicides in fruits, vegetables and their products.

This year has been an extraordinary one for the Earth's climate, for all the wrong reasons: Hurricane Ian devastated southwestern Florida, Hurricane Fiona hammered Nova Scotia, a third of Pakistan was impacted by massive flooding, record heats baked the west coast of North America from British Columbia to California. Europe's heat wave shattered all existing records.

The noble saguaro cactus may take the cake for the most globally iconic desert plant in the Southwest, but it would be impossible for a Southern Californian to imagine a desert landscape without Joshua trees on the horizon.

Subalpine larch (Larix chinensis) is an endemic coniferous tree distributed above 3,100 m above sea level and forms treeline ecotone at the elevation of 3,450 m above sea level in the Qinling Mountains of north-central China. However, two prevailing but competing hypotheses (i.e., the carbon limitation hypothesis and the growth limitation hypothesis) based on carbon supply/demand balance cannot...

A new method has been developed for the rapid detection of microbes from cancer patients. It was developed by a collaborated research team led by Prof. Gu Hongcang from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

When measuring with light, the lateral extent of the structures that can be resolved by an optical imaging system is fundamentally diffraction limited. Overcoming this limitation is a topic of great interest in recent research, and several approaches have been published in this area.