It’s well known that plants have a fine-tuned ability to sense changes in the season by how much daylight they’re exposed to, yet scientists observed more than a century ago that plants sometimes grow during one season and flower in another. Most research...
The world’s scientists rely on an elaborate network of satellites, ocean buoys, weather stations, balloons, and other technologies to help predict the weather and assess the global effects of climate change on terrestrial landscapes, oceans, and the...
The natural world possesses its own intrinsic electrical grid composed of a global web of tiny bacteria-generated nanowires in the soil and oceans that “breathe” by exhaling excess electrons.
In a new study, Yale University researchers discovered that...
A common weed harbors important clues about how to create drought resistant crops in a world beset by climate change.
Yale scientists describe how Portulaca oleracea, commonly known as purslane, integrates two distinct metabolic pathways to create a novel...
Evolution has long been viewed as a rather random process, with the traits of species shaped by chance mutations and environmental events — and therefore largely unpredictable.
But an international team of scientists led by researchers from Yale...
Yale ornithologist Richard Prum has spent years studying the molecules and nanostructures that give many bird species their rich colorful plumage, but nothing prepared him for what he found in hummingbirds.
The range of colors in the plumage of...
Global climate change has already exacerbated the risk of fire and is likely to fuel even more change as accelerating feedback loops create disastrous consequences for both biodiversity and human populations. Yet accurately predicting the risks and impact...
The discovery in 2019 of a lone small female tortoise living on one of the most inaccessible islands of the Galapagos Islands has baffled evolutionary biologists. Only one other tortoise, a large male discovered in 1906, has ever been found on Fernandina...
One proposed strategy in the fight against climate change is to increase tree cover in the world’s savannas, either through the planting of new trees or fire suppression, to boost the uptake of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, a new Yale-led study of...
A global team of researchers, including Yale scientists, is using advanced tagging to track the movement of individual animals across the world, an ambitious research project that is opening a new frontier in efforts to monitor biodiversity change and...