Ancient farmers throttled their immune responses to help survive infectious diseases

Bioenergy Crops One strategy for meeting our future energy needs without fossil carbon is the use of plantations of bioenergy crops such as fast-growing trees or grasses. However, such intensive growth operations are not inherently sustainable and will require fertiliza...

Glaciology Probing the interior structure of ice sheets and tracking their subsurface evolution is essential for projecting ice sheet contributions to sea level rise. Existing techniques using traditional ice-penetrating radar as an active signal source are too resource...

Food Security To grow beef requires many more resources and emits 11-fold more greenhouse gases than raising poultry. It is easy to say eat less meat to mitigate environmental degradation and climate change, but how to do this? Eshel calculated how adopting nitrogen-spa...

The United Kingdom is expected to make it easier to test and commercialize some genetically engineered crops and livestock. The decision, which will be announced by 17 June, applies to plants and animals whose genes have been edited with new precision techniques like CR...

A boost for brain–computer interfaces The finely controlled movement of our limbs requires two-way neuronal communication between the brain and the body periphery. This includes afferent information from muscles, joints, and skin, as well as visual feedback to plan, in...

In February 2019, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) made a significant—and apparently secret—change to how it oversees laboratory animal welfare. Instead of fully inspecting all of the nearly 1100 facilities that house monkeys, rabbits, and other creatures used ...

Imaging Light detection and ranging (LIDAR) is an invaluable tool used in remote sensing to map out the detailed three-dimensional features of terrain. Based on time-of-flight measurements of emitted, reflected, and detected single photons, the geographic scenery can be...

Human health is dependent on a plentiful and nutritious supply of food, primarily derived from crop plants. Rhythmic supply of light as a result of the day and night cycle led to the evolution of circadian clocks that modulate most plant physiology, photosynthesis, meta...