ScienceDaily: Top Environment News

As Florida and other states become more urbanized, an increasing number of stormwater ponds are built. Florida already has 76,000 such ponds. The newer ones emit more carbon than they store, a new study finds. Researchers hope this finding will inform policy makers and others about when, where and how to install stormwater ponds.

Physics and astronomy professors have developed a theory and performed a series of simulations that may help explain how a virus finds its native genome and how capsids form around it and not around other RNAs in the cell.

The California scrub-jay, a generally non-social bird, can learn just as well as another species of jay that lives in groups, a finding that surprised animal intelligence researchers who devised a novel food puzzle to study cognition in the wild.

Computational biologists have created a neural network model capable of predicting how changes to non-coding DNA sequences in yeast affect gene expression. They also devised a unique way of representing this data in two dimensions, making it easy to understand the past and future evolution of non-coding sequences in organisms beyond yeast -- and even design custom gene expression patterns for gene therapies and industrial applications. Despite the sheer number of genes that each human cell contains, these so-called 'coding' DNA sequences comprise just 1% of our entire genome. The remaining 99% is made up of 'non-coding' DNA -- which, unlike coding DNA, does not carry the instructions to build proteins.

A research team elucidates how bacteria use the compound guanidine as a source of nitrogen.

Tiny cellular machines called ribosomes build proteins. When this building process goes awry in bacteria, ribosomes collide, triggering the arrival of a first responder molecule that begins a rescue operation.

Viruses are tiny but mighty intruders that can be found in the environment including in human bodies, and they can play a variety of roles in ecosystems. Viruses also come in a range of sizes. Some are even larger than bacteria, which scientists thought were rare cases until recently.

A team led by scientists has come a step closer to uncovering the purpose of a distinctive set of modifications found at the beginning of messenger RNA which have long remained a fundamental mystery in molecular biology.

Green turtle numbers continue to rise on a group of islands where the species has now been protected for more than 50 years, new research shows.

Disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires, floods, tornadoes, and droughts are not only increasing in intensity and frequency, they are also striking the same place multiple times. Yet, to date, disaster research largely focuses on individual events, and fails to account for legacy effects that leave people vulnerable in the wake of repeated disasters. To improve predictive capacity to better prepare for future disasters, an interdisciplinary team of researchers has developed a novel framework for improving scientific understanding of 'recurrent acute disasters' (RADs). Their work was published today in Science Advances.