ScienceDaily: Top Environment News

New research explores the effects fire has on ecosystems and the wildlife species that inhabit them. Scientists examined the impacts of fires of different severity levels on birds and how that changes as the time since fire increases. Scientists looked across 10 fires after they burned through forests in the Sierra Nevada. A key finding was that wildfire had strong, but varied, effects on the density of many of the bird species that were studied.

Biologists have shown that gonad development varies in other nematodes relative to C. elegans. Specifically, they focused on Steinernema carpocapsae, a nematode used in insect biocontrol applications in lawns and gardens.

Art curators will be able to recover images on daguerreotypes, the earliest form of photography that used silver plates, after a team of scientists learned how to use light to see through degradation that has occurred over time.

A new study provides a platform for predicting how microbial gut communities work and represents a first step toward understanding how to manipulate the properties of the gut ecosystem. This could allow scientists to, for example, design a probiotic that persists in the gut or tailor a diet to positively influence human health.

It's been known for years that humans and other mammals possess an antiviral gene called RSAD2 that prevents a remarkable range of viruses from multiplying. Now, researchers have discovered the secret to the gene's success: The enzyme it codes for generates a compound that stops viruses from replicating. The newly discovered compound offers a novel approach for attacking many disease-causing viruses.

Polymer chemists have taken another step toward a future of high-performance, biorenewable, biodegradable plastics. The team describes chemical synthesis of a polymer called bacterial poly(3-hydroxybutyrate) ­- or P3HB. The compound shows early promise as a substitute for petroleum plastics in major industrial uses.

New research based on the Italian experience with outbreaks of Chikungunya, a disease borne by the tiger mosquito, in 2007 and 2017, shows that different vector control strategies are needed, depending on the time when the first cases are notified, 'thus providing useful indications supporting urgent decision-making of public health authorities in response to emerging mosquito-borne epidemics', one of the researchers says.

Researchers have identified a potentially new approach to treating lethal fungal infections that claim more than 1.6 million lives each year: starving the fungi of key nutrients, preventing their growth and spread.

After wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s, some scientists thought the large predator reestablished a 'landscape of fear' that caused elk, the wolf's main prey, to avoid risky places where wolves killed them. But according to recent findings, Yellowstone's 'landscape of fear' is not as scary as first thought.