Frontiers | Science News

Science News post list

413 news posts in Life sciences

Life sciences

27 Jan 2025

Drones could be the ‘magic tools’ we need to chase bears away from people

Starting in 2017, Wesley Sarmento was the first prairie-based bear manager at Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, a job that regularly put him right in between massive grizzly bears and people. He is also the author of a new Frontiers in Conservation Science article in which he describes the effectiveness of different methods that aimed to deter bears from human settlements, avoid conflicts between wildlife and locals, and help the successful conservation of the species. In the following guest editorial, he describes his seven-year-long search for the most effective hazing method.

Life sciences

16 Dec 2024

Completing the timetree of primates: a new way to map the evolutionary history of life on Earth

In a new article published in Frontiers in Bioinformatics, biologists Dr Jack M Craig, Dr Blair Hedges, and Dr Sudhir Kumar, all at Temple University, have built an evolutionary tree that encompasses 455 primates, every species for which genetic data are available. The tree, the most complete of its kind, shows the evolutionary timescale of the whole order of primates, including monkeys, apes, lemurs, lorises, and galagos. In the following guest editorial, Dr Craig describes the steps of obtaining an almost complete timetree for primates and explains the value of such data.

Life sciences

04 Dec 2024

Broken sleep a hallmark sign of living with this common liver disease, scientists find

Researchers from Switzerland have shown that patients with metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) suffer poor sleep due to sleep fragmentation and wakefulness. Patients with the more severe form metabolic dysfunction–associated steatohepatitis (MASH) or with cirrhosis, but not healthy volunteers, experienced similar sleep disturbances. Whether poor sleep causes MASLD or vice versa isn’t yet clear. A single sleep hygiene education session proved insufficient to sustainably improve sleep quality and quantity.

Life sciences

25 Nov 2024

Viking colonizers of Iceland and nearby Faroe Islands had very different origins, study finds

Geneticists have studied the distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroups on the Faroe Islands, known to have been colonized by Vikings around the year 900 CE, and compared these to distributions of haplogroups in today’s Scandinavia. They showed with novel analysis methods that the haplotype distribution in the Faroe Islands most closely resembled that in Norway and Denmark, and to a lesser extent that in Sweden, but differed from that in Iceland. They concluded that a band of Viking men from all over Scandinavia colonized the Faroe Islands, which differed in their geographical origin and genetic make-up from those who settled Iceland.

Life sciences

18 Oct 2024

Scientists create new overwintering sites for monarch butterflies on a warming planet

Migrating monarch butterflies depend on mountain forests of sacred firs in Mexico as overwintering sites. These forests are under threat from global warming. But researchers from Mexico have now shown that seedlings derived from their original range can be transplanted successfully to a new site further east, on the higher and colder volcano Nevado de Toluca. The resulting new stand of sacred firs could ultimately serve as the overwintering sites of the future.

Life sciences

20 Sep 2024

Oceanic life found to be thriving thanks to Saharan dust blown from thousands of kilometers away

Scientists from the US measured the relative amounts of ‘bioreactive’ iron in four sediment cores from the bottom of the Atlantic. They showed for the first time that the further dust is blown from the Sahara, the more iron in it becomes bioreactive through chemical processes in the atmosphere. These results have important implications for our understanding of the growth-promoting effect of iron on oceanic phytoplankton, terrestrial ecosystems, and carbon cycling, including under global change.

Life sciences

17 Sep 2024

How does a tiny shrimp find its way home in a vast ocean? Study finds it’s down to their cave’s special smell

Researchers from France have shown for the first time that mysid shrimp can distinguish between seawater from their cave of origin and that from nearby caves. This recognition behavior, based on local differences in water-borne odor mixes or ‘chemical seascapes’, is likely what enables the shrimp’s homing behavior when they return each dawn from their foraging trips in open water.