FLORA FAUNA

5,060 articles

Fewer buyers for S.Africa's first online rhino horn, organiser
Aug 26, 2017 (AFP)
John Hume, owner of the world's largest rhino farm, organised the controversial three-day selloff which ended on Friday. Hume "has successfully concluded the wo...
Female squirrels align births to increase survival of young
Aug 24, 2017 (UPI)
A phenomenon known as spruce mast seeding occurs twice in a decade where spruce trees produce huge numbers of spruce cones beyond the normal amount. "When this ...
The secret life of dodos, revealed
Aug 24, 2017 (AFP)
"A strange and grotesque specimen of bird... bearing a ridiculous bent bill," was the verdict of early 17th century Dutch admiral and explorer Wybrand van Warwi...
Biodiversity does not always mean more funding
Aug 23, 2017 (UPI)
The study, conducted at the University of Castile-La Mancha, the University of New York, the National Museum of Natural History, the University of Alcala and th...
S.Africa's first online rhino horn auction sparks anger
Aug 23, 2017 (AFP)
The three-day selloff, organised by the owner of the world's largest rhino farm, kicked off after a last-minute legal tussle pushed it back two days. "It has st...
Scientists uncover two-layer identification among soil bacteria
Aug 22, 2017 (UPI)
Similar to the digital world where two-factor authentication is required to verify identify, researchers found that the soil bacterium Myxococcus xanthus has be...
Study: Caterpillars rely less on microbiome than other animals
Aug 22, 2017 (UPI)
Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder say that the microbiome caterpillars do have serves no real role aside from causing disease. The study, publish...
Flowers use nectar as a weapon of distraction
Aug 21, 2017 (UPI)
Nectar is the honey produced by flowers that provides a come-on to bees and other insects to attract them to pollinate the flower. But researchers found recentl...
Mountain-side genome sequencing a win for science
Aug 21, 2017 (UPI)
"This research proves that we can now rapidly read the DNA sequence of an organism to identify it with minimum equipment," Joe Parker, a scientist at Kew, said ...
Mechanism identified for plants to recover from heat stress
Aug 21, 2017 (UPI)
Identifying the mechanisms of heat tolerance on plants is important because high temperature damage to crops is increasing due to climate change. "One of our mo...
New bioimaging technique is fast and economical
Aug 21, 2017 (SPX)
"We have developed a smart way to acquire a massive amount of information in a short period of time," said Xavier Intes, a professor of biomedical engineering a...
Chile rejects iron mine to protect penguins
Aug 21, 2017 (AFP)
Local firm Andes Iron wanted to extract millions of tons of the metal in the northern Coquimbo region and build a new port to ship it out. A committee of minist...
Hunter Island penguin species never actually existed, study says
Aug 16, 2017 (UPI)
New analysis suggests the specimen, unearthed on Tasmania's Hunter Island in 1983, is comprised of bones from three living penguin species. The revelation was m...
Bangladesh hopes to rekindle passion to save rare crocodiles
Aug 13, 2017 (AFP)
A 36-year-old female gharial -- a fish-eating crocodile once native to rivers across the Indian subcontinent -- was brought from a zoo in northeast Bangladesh t...
Alcohol helps goldfish make through the winter without oxygen
Aug 11, 2017 (UPI)
Scientists at the universities of Oslo and Liverpool discovered the key to the goldfish's unique metabolic ability: a pair of proteins key to the breakdown of c...
Rogue elephant tramples 15 to death in India, faces culling
Aug 09, 2017 (AFP)
Wildlife rangers and hunters assembled in Jharkhand after another victim was trampled to death Tuesday evening, the state's chief forest and wildlife conservato...
New study details one of biology's largest proteins
Aug 09, 2017 (UPI)
The protein MpAFP, an "adhesion" measuring 600 nanometers in length, helps the Marinomonas promoryiensis bacterium attach itself to ice. Scientists hope their a...
Skin-ditching gecko inexplicably leaves body armor behind when threatened
Aug 07, 2017 (SPX)
Their unusually large, overlapping scales flake off so easily that one biologist in the late 1800s tried collecting the geckos with cotton, but even with carefu...
Animals have it all over us when it comes to color
Aug 07, 2017 (SPX)
The Queensland Brain Institute's Professor Justin Marshall , co-author of a study undertaken with international colleagues, said colour had an important role in...
The biology of color
Aug 07, 2017 (SPX)
While studies have long used color as a factor for understanding evolution, only recently have visual physiologists, sensory and behavioral ecologists, evolutio...
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