Beluga Whales Thanksgiving Day
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Pinpointing the ‘silent’ mutations that gave the coronavirus an evolutionary edge
Reading Time: 2 minutesWE know that the coronavirus behind the COVID-19 crisis lived harmlessly in bats and other wildlife before it jumped the species barrier and spilled over to humans. Now, researchers at Duke University have identified a number of “silent” mutations in the roughly 30,000 letters of the virus’s genetic code that helped it thrive once it […]
Plastic-eating enzyme ‘cocktail’ heralds new hope for plastic waste
Reading Time: 3 minutesTHE scientists who re-engineered the plastic-eating enzyme PETase have now created an enzyme ‘cocktail’ which can digest plastic up to six times faster. A second enzyme, found in the same rubbish dwelling bacterium that lives on a diet of plastic bottles, has been combined with PETase to speed up the breakdown of plastic. PETase breaks […]
Aerial images detect and track food security threats for millions of African farmers
Reading Time: 2 minutesNEW research shows how a combination of imagery from mobile phones, drones and satellites can be used to clamp down on banana threats. The images of varying resolutions are fed into a platform “trained” through machine learning to identify banana crops and analyze threats with 97% overall accuracy. The findings were published in the ISPRS Journal […]
War on plastic is distracting from more urgent threats to environment, experts warn
Reading Time: 3 minutesA team of leading environmental experts, spearheaded by the University of Nottingham, have warned that the current war on plastic is detracting from the bigger threats to the environment. In an article published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) Water, the 13 experts* say that while plastic waste is an issue, its prominence in the […]