In 2012, a crop of California's most prized ornamental trees was overrun by an invisible invader. The growing shoots of coral beans — the official city tree of Los Angeles — began wilting and falling away, revealing stems that had been hollowed out from the inside by the caterpillars of Erythrina stem borer moths. A new study published this Wednesday in the Journal of Applied Entomology reveals the culprit's origin through a DNA analysis of insects provided by the late Dan Lindsley, formerly a retired UC San Diego professor of genetics.

African Plant Nutrition Institute (APNI), Fertilizer Canada, and OCP Africa have recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to collaborate on agriculture development programmes that target sub-Saharan rural farmers, particularly women and youth. The planned interventions will see a marked improvement in food-security and livelihoods for smallholder farmers through joint programming, shared learning, and resource mobilisation.

An international team of scientists from the UK, Spain, Denmark and Russia (including researchers from the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience) conducted an experiment demonstrating that people automatically integrate extralinguistic information into grammatical processing during verbal communication. The study findings were published in the Scientific Reports Journal.

Researchers from Uppsala University and elsewhere have been studying the effect of rising temperatures on the lifespan of pollinating fig wasps. The findings show that the wasps lived much shorter lives at high temperatures, which would make it difficult for them to travel the long distances between the trees they pollinate.

Findings from Canadian influenza vaccine effectiveness assessment for the 2021/22 season support switch to a different A(H3N2) strain for the northern hemisphere influenza vaccine 2022/23.

Biological systems fascinate scientists across disciplines because they come up with creative solutions to problems posed by their environment. Most strikingly, they can give rise to highly complex structures like the human brain or insect societies. In recent years it has also become clear that such systems at the same time have the remarkable capacity to rapidly break up an rebuild such structures, for example when cells reprogram to heal tissues after injury. One would expect that the same processes that maintain highly specialized structures also prohibit flexibility in response to signals from the environment. So how can biological systems simultaneously achieve robust specialization and rapid plasticity?