In underwater experiments off Alaska, red sea urchins kept their distance from kelp blades placed near caged sunflower sea stars, suggesting that the mere presence of these predators can protect kelp forests.

The new approach can better target drugs and other bioactive compounds used to improve human and animal health.

Florida’s Avon Park bombing range is teeming with life. Over 40 at-risk species occupy this 106,000-acre expanse used by the U.S. Air Force for training exercises. Conservation biologists from Michigan State University are using the range to test something other than weapons: innovative strategies to save threatened species. Using decades’ worth of monitoring data, researchers are looking back through time to understand the outcome of interventions designed to rescue a population of imperiled red-cockaded woodpeckers. What they’ve found is a promising story of success.  

In a new study, scientists used nearly every tool in their toolkit — genomics, transcriptomics, greenhouse experiments and advanced statistical methods — to gain new insight into the complex chemical interactions that take place in underground root nodules, where legumes like soybeans exchange vital nutrients with soil microbes called rhizobia.

Researchers have successfully demonstrated a spectrometer that is orders of magnitude smaller than current technologies and can accurately measure wavelengths of light from ultraviolet to the near-infrared. The technology makes it possible to create hand-held spectroscopy devices and holds promise for the development of devices that incorporate an array of the new sensors to serve as next-generation imaging spectrometers.

MIT physicists performed an idealized version of the double-slit experiment, stripping it to its quantum essentials. They confirmed that light exists as both a wave and a particle but cannot be observed in both forms at the same time.

Though scientists have long understood how lightning strikes, the precise atmospheric events that trigger it within thunderclouds remained a perplexing mystery. The mystery may be solved, thanks to a team of researchers led by Victor Pasko, professor of electrical engineering in the Penn State School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, that has revealed the powerful chain reaction that triggers lightning.

Dylan Shropshire, assistant professor of biological sciences, studies Wolbachia, a bacterium that lives inside insect cells and can manipulate reproduction, suppress pathogens, and influence population dynamics—all while being passed maternally from one generation to the next. Originally interested in insect behavior, Shropshire was drawn to microbiomes during his graduate studies at Vanderbilt University, where he began working with Wolbachia. His lab now focuses on understanding how this microbe becomes common across species, populations, and individuals, with implications for public health efforts that use Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes to combat diseases like dengue and Zika. Despite success in some regions, these interventions are often slow or fail due to weak bacterial traits. Shropshire’s team uses fruit flies to study the genetic and cellular mechanisms that underlie Wolbachia’s behavior, including how it spreads, exits and enters host cells, and manipulates reproduction through a process called cytoplasmic incompatibility. Since Wolbachia cannot be cultured outside host cells, the lab develops innovative tools such as genetic insertions and molecular techniques to measure bacterial presence and function. Their work not only aims to answer fundamental questions about microbial ecology and evolution, but also to refine and accelerate the use of Wolbachia as a targeted, sustainable tool for controlling vector-borne diseases.