ScienceDaily: Top Environment News

Using second-long electrical shocks, scientists discovered they could control the types of cells in a community of bacteria. Being able to direct the ratio of cells holds implications for settings spanning agriculture to health care, where antibiotic resistance is a significant threat.

Substituting 20 % of meat from cattle with microbial protein -- a meat alternative produced in fermentation tanks -- by 2050 could halve deforestation, a new analysis finds. The market-ready meat alternative is very similar in taste and texture, but is a biotech product which -- by replacing beef -- involves much less land resources and greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and land-use change. This goes under the assumption of a growing world population's increasing appetite for beefy bites, and it is the first time researchers have projected the development of these market-ready meat substitutes into the future, assessing their potential impact on the environment.

Plants can't speak up when they are thirsty. And visual signs, such as shriveling or browning leaves, don't start until most of their water is gone. To detect water loss earlier, researchers have created a wearable sensor for plant leaves. The system wirelessly transmits data to a smartphone app, allowing for remote management of drought stress in gardens and crops.

Using satellite imagery to study the effects of a 2019 landslide on the Amalia Glacier in Patagonia, a research team found the landslide helped stabilize the glacier and caused it to grow by about 1,000 meters over the last three years.

In the search for eternal youth, fecal transplants may seem like an unlikely way to reverse the aging process. However, scientists have provided evidence, from research in mice, that transplanting fecal microbiota from young into old mice can reverse hallmarks of aging in the gut, eyes, and brain. In the reverse experiment, microbes from aged mice induced inflammation in the brain of young recipients and depleted a key protein required for normal vision. These findings show that gut microbes play a role in the regulating some of the detrimental effects of ageing and open up the possibility of gut microbe-based therapies to combat decline in later life.

A new study highlights a sharp contrast between urban and suburban ways of thinking about coastal ecosystems. The authors of the study used statistical and cognitive science techniques to analyze data from a survey of 1,400 residents across the U.S. East Coast. Their results showed that surveyed residents of urban centers often held a more simplistic, and less realistic, understanding of coastal ecosystems than residents in suburban areas. The research also uncovered a lower propensity to take pro-environmental actions among urban populations.

Scientists have used tools of genetics research akin to those used in genealogical research to evaluate the diversity of marine life off the California coast. Large-scale 'metabarcoding' methods could revolutionize how society understands forces that drive seafood supply, planet's ability to remove greenhouse gases.

Squid, octopus, and cuttlefish -- even to scientists who study them -- are wonderfully weird creatures. Known as the soft-bodied or coleoid cephalopods, they have the largest nervous system of any invertebrate, complex behaviors such as instantaneous camouflage, arms studded with dexterous suckers, and other evolutionarily unique traits. Now, scientists have dug into the cephalopod genome to understand how these unusual animals came to be. Along the way, they discovered cephalopod genomes are as weird as the animals are. Scientists from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, the University of Vienna, the University of Chicago, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, reported their findings in two new studies in Nature Communications.

Seems like kids are always getting into something, so products marketed toward them often claim to repel liquids. Some items contain potentially harmful per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to accomplish this feat, but companies aren't required to disclose these 'forever chemicals' on labels. Now, researchers show that some children's products advertised as water- or stain-resistant contain PFAS, even items labeled 'green' or 'nontoxic.'