ScienceDaily: Earth & Climate News

New research uncovers the negative link between flight-worthiness and fight-worthiness in birds. Evolutionary pressure demanded that birds could either fly or arm themselves -- but not both. Furthermore, the new research suggests that developing wings and not bony spurs involved both sexual and natural selection. This insight helps us better understand how the enormous diversity of life and earth came to be.

Morphogenesis is nature's way of building diverse structures and functions out of a fixed set of components. While nature is rich with examples of morphogenesis -- cell differentiation, embryonic development and cytoskeleton formation, for example -- research into the phenomenon in synthetic materials is scant. Researchers are taking a step forward using electron tomography, fluid dynamics theories and machine learning to watch soft polymers as the polymers learn from nature.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the cusp of driving an agricultural revolution, and helping confront the challenge of feeding our growing global population in a sustainable way. But researchers warn that using new AI technologies at scale holds huge risks that are not being considered.

A research team has used changing patterns of salt in the ocean to estimate that between 1970 and 2014, at least two times more freshwater shifted from the equator to the poles than our climate models predicted -- giving us insights about how the global water cycle is amplifying as a whole.

Researchers have found that soybean crops planted near pollinator habitat produce larger soybeans than soybean crops that are not planted near pollinator habitat.

The Colorado potato beetle has evolved resistance to more than 50 different kinds of insecticides, making the insect a 'super pest' that wreaks havoc on potatoes around the world. New research finds that the beetle achieved this feat largely by turning to a deep pool of diversity within its genome, which allowed different populations across the U.S. to quickly evolve resistance to nearly anything humans have thrown at it.

The likelihood of hot, dry, windy autumn weather that can set the stage for severe fires in California and western Oregon has increased 40 percent due to human-caused climate change, new computer models show.

After an E.coli outbreak in 2006 devastated the spinach industry, farmers were pressured to remove natural habitat to keep wildlife -- and the foodborne pathogens they can sometimes carry -- from visiting crops. A study of California strawberry farms found that birds were actually more likely to carry pathogens and eat berries when farms did not have surrounding natural habitat.

Succinic acid is an important precursor for pharmaceutical and cosmetic products and also serves as a component in biodegradable plastics. It is currently derived mainly from petroleum-based processes. Researchers are using the marine bacterium Vibrio natriegens as a biocatalyst. This could permit the production of succinic acid in sustainable processes using renewable raw materials.

In the context of trade-offs between land use and biodiversity, geographers have simulated land saving potentials for agriculture.

Growing rice alongside aquatic animals can reduce the need for chemical fertilizers and pesticides, as well as increase farmers' yields, shows a new study.