Plant Power: A New Method to Model How Plants Move Water Globally

Golden hour looking out on the UConn Forest.
Photo Credit: Sean Flynn/UConn Photo

Scientific Frontline: "At a Glance" Summary: A New Method to Model How Plants Move Water Globally

• Main Discovery: Researchers developed a novel method utilizing evolutionary relationships to infer the hydrologic traits of over 55,000 tree species, bypassing the need for individual field measurements to understand how plants influence global water circulation.
• Methodology: The team analyzed existing data on physical plant traits, such as tree height, root depth, and internal water flow speed. By applying numerical machine learning techniques and phylogenetic testing, they mapped the evolutionary relatedness of species to impute missing data, relying on the high level of trait conservation among closely related plants.
• Key Data: The newly created database encompasses vital hydrological values for 55,000 tree species, drastically expanding upon the 5,000 to 15,000 species previously cataloged. This dataset is critical given that an estimated 60 percent of all global rainfall is returned to the atmosphere through plant transpiration.
• Significance: This breakthrough enables Earth system models to move beyond oversimplified, generic plant classifications. Integrating highly detailed, species-specific vegetation data provides a much more accurate foundation for simulating complex atmospheric interactions and predicting climate change impacts.
• Future Application: The imputed data will be systematically tested against long-term physical observations from ten forested locations across the United States. Researchers ultimately aim to apply this methodology globally to refine Earth system models and investigate the underlying environmental drivers of plant trait variations.
• Branch of Science: Earth Science, Environmental Science, Hydrology

Tiny copper ‘flowers’ bloom on artificial leaves for clean fuel production

Solar fuel generator 
Image Credit: Virgil Andrei

Tiny copper ‘nano-flowers’ have been attached to an artificial leaf to produce clean fuels and chemicals that are the backbone of modern energy and manufacturing.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley, developed a practical way to make hydrocarbons – molecules made of carbon and hydrogen – powered solely by the sun.

The device they developed combines a light absorbing ‘leaf’ made from a high-efficiency solar cell material called perovskite, with a copper nanoflower catalyst, to convert carbon dioxide into useful molecules. Unlike most metal catalysts, which can only convert CO₂ into single-carbon molecules, the copper flowers enable the formation of more complex hydrocarbons with two carbon atoms, such as ethane and ethylene — key building blocks for liquid fuels, chemicals and plastics.

Almost all hydrocarbons currently stem from fossil fuels, but the method developed by the Cambridge-Berkeley team results in clean chemicals and fuels made from CO2, water and glycerol – a common organic compound – without any additional carbon emissions. The results are reported in the journal Nature Catalysis.

Improved treatment timing reduces honey bee losses to Varroa mites

Varroa destructor mite.
Photo Credit: Fera Science

Honey bee mortality can be significantly reduced by ensuring that treatments for the parasitic Varroa mite occur within specific timeframes, a new study reveals.

The mites—belonging to the species Varroa destructor—feed on the larvae of bees and can destroy colonies if not treated at key time points to reduce or remove infestations.

But researchers have found that more than a third of beekeepers surveyed in England and Wales deviate from recommended treatment guidelines, often missing these application windows.

They further observed that beekeepers who mistimed Varroa mite treatments experienced exacerbated colony losses, with this effect occurring across a wide range of medications.

“The main finding here was that a major cause of honeybee mortality could, in theory, be quite easy to reduce,” said Dr Thomas O’Shea-Wheller, lead author of the study, from the University of Exeter.

Temperature, rainfall and tides speed glacier flow on a daily basis

The calving front of the Bowdoin Glacier/Kangerluarsuup Sermia.
Photo Credit: Shin Sugiyama

Even though ‘glacial’ is commonly used to describe extremely slow, steady movement, a new study has found that glaciers speed up and slow down on a daily – even hourly – basis in response to changes in air temperature, rainfall and the tides.

A research team including scientists from Japan’s Hokkaido University studied the movement of a glacier in Greenland over six summers and mapped those movements against local weather patterns and tides to explore how these affect the glacier’s flow. The results have been published in the journal The Cryosphere.

“Short-term speed variations are key to understanding the physical processes controlling glacial motion, but studies are sparse for Greenlandic tidewater glaciers, particularly near the calving front,” says Hokkaido University’s Shin Sugiyama, lead author of the study. “Studying glacier dynamics near the ocean boundary is crucial to understanding the current and future mass loss of the ice sheet.”

DNA study targets drug making

Image Credit: Courtesy of Flinders University

DNA profiling technologies are rapidly advancing, creating the potential to identify individuals involved in making, packing and transporting illegal capsules by analyzing the exterior of the illicit drugs and the ziplock plastic bag in which they are carried.

Experiments carried out by Flinders University forensic science experts found DNA accumulates in different areas, depending on an individual’s involvement in the process, which could aid identification of people involved in the drug-making and trade.

The study also found DNA from the surface of capsules can be transferred to the inner surface of ziplock bags commonly used in transportation.

Self-Assembling Cerebral Blood Vessels: A Breakthrough in Alzheimer’s Treatment

Image Credit: Courtesy of Pohang University of Science and Technology

A 3D model accurately mimicking the Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB) in a laboratory environment has been successfully developed by research teams led by Professor Jinah Jang from the Departments of Mechanical Engineering, Life Sciences, IT Convergence Engineering, and the Graduate School of Convergence at POSTECH, and Professor Sun Ha Paek from the Department of Neurosurgery at Seoul National University Hospital. This study was recently published in Biomaterials Research, an international academic journal on materials science.

Neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), result from the progressive decline of brain and nervous system functions, primarily due to aging. Chronic neuroinflammation, a key driver of these disorders, arises from the intricate interactions between cerebral blood vessels and neural cells, where the BBB plays a pivotal regulatory role. However, existing BBB models have been unable to replicate the complex three-dimensional 3D structure of cerebral blood vessels, posing significant challenges for research and drug development.

The metal that does not expand

Metal usually expands when heated
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Technische Universität Wien

Breakthrough in materials research: an alloy of several metals has been developed that shows practically no thermal expansion over an extremely large temperature interval.

Most metals expand when their temperature rises. The Eiffel Tower, for example, is around 10 to 15 centimeters taller in summer than in winter due to its thermal expansion. However, this effect is extremely undesirable for many technical applications. For this reason, the search has long been on for materials that always have the same length regardless of the temperature. Invar, for example, an alloy of iron and nickel, is known for its extremely low thermal expansion. How this property can be explained physically, however, was not entirely clear until now.

Now, a collaboration between theoretical researchers at TU Wien (Vienna) and experimentalists at University of Science and Technology Beijing has led to a decisive breakthrough: using complex computer simulations, it has been possible to understand the invar effect in detail and thus develop a so-called pyrochlore magnet – an alloy that has even better thermal expansion properties than invar. Over an extremely wide temperature range of over 400 Kelvins, its length only changes by around one ten-thousandth of one per cent per Kelvin.

New light-tuned chemical tools control processes in living cells

Jun Zhang, Laura Herzog and Yaowen Wu have found a way to control proteins in living cells.
Photo Credit: Shuang Li

A research group at Umeå University has developed new advanced light-controlled tools that enable precise control of proteins in real time in living cells. This groundbreaking research opens doors to new methods for studying complex processes in cells and could pave the way for significant advances in medicine and synthetic biology.

In our experiments, we were able to demonstrate precise control over several processes in the cell

“Cellular processes are complex and constantly change depending on when and where in the cell they occur. Our new chemical tool with light switches will make it easier to control processes in the cell and study how cells function in real time. We can also determine where we make such regulation with a resolution of micrometres within a cell or tissue”, says Yaowen Wu, professor at the Department of Chemistry and SciLifeLab Group leader at Umeå University.

The intricate choreography of what happens in a cell is based on the precise distribution and interaction of proteins over time and space. Controlling protein or gene function is a cornerstone of modern biological research. However, traditional genetic techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9 often operate on a longer time scale, which risks causing cells to adapt. In addition, the techniques lack the spatial and temporal precision required to study highly dynamic cellular processes.

Mount Rainier White-Tailed Ptarmigan Finally Receives a ‘Threatened’ Species Designation

An adult Mount Rainier white-tailed ptarmigan in brown summer plumage. Its feathers change seasonally—white in the winter, white and brown in the spring. Its tail remains white year-round.
Photo Credit: Pete Plage/USFWS

In July, the Mount Rainier white-tailed ptarmigan was officially listed as threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), 14 years after the Center for Biological Diversity first petitioned for its listing. This designation is meant to help preserve the bird, whose survival depends on the glaciers of the Cascade Mountains of Washington State and British Columbia. It also reflects the complex challenges that alpine-adapted birds face in a warming world.

With its feathered, snowshoe-like feet that allow it to walk on high mountain terrain and its seasonal plumage that provides camouflage year-round, Mount Rainier white-tailed ptarmigans are adapted to high elevation regions above the treeline. They are frequently spotted in areas with mixed rock, snow and alpine plants. Their diet consists of twigs, leaves, buds and seeds of alpine tundra vegetation that only grow in treeless, cold and dry mountainous regions that receive critical moisture from spring snowmelt and summer glacier runoff.

Warming temperatures are accelerating glacier retreat and endangering the bird’s habitat: glaciers in the North Cascades shrunk 56 percent between 1900 and 2009. Mauri Pelto, director of the North Cascade Glacier Climate Project, told GlacierHub that ptarmigans are often spotted along the Shuksan and Ptarmigan Ridges near Mount Baker. In a study, Pelto found that seven of the 13 glaciers along those ridges have disappeared since the mid-1980s. Retreating glaciers risk reduced soil water availability for tundra vegetation and long-term habitat loss associated with warming temperatures.

Life cycles of some insects adapt well to a changing climate. Others, not so much.

A grasshopper, Melanoplus boulderensis, typical of the Colorado Rocky Mountains.
Photo Credit: ©Thomas Naef, 2022

As insect populations decrease worldwide in what some have called an “insect apocalypse,” biologists are desperate to determine how the six-legged creatures are responding to a warming world and to predict the long-term winners and losers.

A new study of Colorado grasshoppers shows that, while the answers are complicated, biologists have much of the knowledge they need to make these predictions and prepare for the consequences.

The findings, published in the journal PLOS Biology, come thanks to the serendipitous discovery of 13,000 grasshoppers collected from the same Colorado mountain site between 1958 and 1960 by a biologist at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder). After that scientist’s untimely death in 1973, the collection was rescued by his son and donated to the CU Museum, where it languished until 2005, when César Nufio, then a postdoctoral fellow, rediscovered it. Nufio set about curating the collection and initiated a resurvey of the same sites to collect more grasshoppers.