Animals eating plants might seem like an obvious way to suppress fire, and humans are already using the enormous appetites of goats, deer, and cows to reduce the fuel available for potential wildfires. 
Transmission of diseases from wildlife to livestock is a common threat in Alberta, according to new research by University of Alberta biologists. Foothills in the southwestern part of the province are home to wild elk as well as cattle on ranchlands -- and when the species intermingle, the potential for disease to spread grows.
Consumers are likely wasting much more food than commonly believed, according to a study published February 12, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Monika van den Bos Verma and colleagues from Wageningen University and Research, The Netherlands.
The first articulated Neanderthal skeleton to come out of the ground for over 20 years has been unearthed at one of the most important sites of mid-20th century archaeology: Shanidar Cave, in the foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Komorebi is a Japanese word that describes how light filters through leaves -- creating shifting, dappled "sunflecks" that illustrate plants' ever-changing light environment. 
Domesticated rice has fatter seed grains with higher starch content than its wild rice relatives -- the result of many generations of preferential seed sorting and sowing. But even though rice was the first crop to be fully sequenced, scientists have only documented a few of the genetic changes that made rice into a staple food for more than half the world's population.
Most people are familiar with the historical Silk Road, but fewer people realize that the exchange of items, ideas, technology, and human genes through the mountain valleys of Central Asia started almost three millennia before organized trade networks formed. 
The Neolithic revolution, and the corresponding transition to agricultural and pastoralist lifestyles, represents one of the greatest cultural shifts in human history, and it has long been hypothesized that this might have also provided the opportunity for the emergence of human-adapted diseases.