A recently published article in the journal BioScience reveals that endangered longleaf pine ecosystems—among North America's most biodiverse habitats—face mounting threats from intensifying hurricane regimes driven by climate change. An interdisciplinary team of authors headed by Nicole Zampieri (Tall Timbers and The Jones Center at Ichauway) describe the urgent situation: The North American Coastal Plain was once characterized by extensive longleaf pine savannas covering approximately 36 million hectares. Today, these ecosystems "now occupy less than 5% of their historic distribution, primarily because of habitat fragmentation, widespread unsustainable logging, land-use conversion, and fire suppression during the past half millennium."

How do we determine how healthy our food is? We know now that our nutrition shouldn’t just be measured in calories, or even in just macronutrients (the balance of fats, protein, and carbohydrates). An emerging body of research is instead demonstrating that the unique interplay between nutrients and components and how they connect to each other to form a holistic food matrix all play a role in the nutritional value that foods deliver. A new review article in a special issue of the Journal of Dairy Science, published by Elsevier, dedicated to the dairy matrix and human nutrition explores what the latest science has to say about the incredible structural complexity of dairy foods, as well as the impact of the dairy food matrix on nutrient digestion and absorption.

A new study finds that people value empathy more when they believe it comes from a human—even if the actual response was generated by AI. Across nine studies involving over 6,000 participants, the research reveals that human-attributed responses are perceived as more supportive, more emotionally resonant, and more caring than identical AI-generated responses.

Urban gardens are perfect spaces for communing with nature and building social bonds. Such places can also be important for climate change mitigation. Does urban gardening in Warsaw have potential and how to develop related initiatives? Researchers from the SWPS University, Warsaw University of Technology and the Warsaw University of Life Sciences investigated this issue.