Archives for 2014

The 1KITE project (1,000 Insect Transcriptome Evolution) seeks to understand the millions of living insect species that shape our terrestrial living space and both support and threaten our natural resources by analyzing more than 1,000 insect transcriptomes, a set of all RNA molecules…”Phylogeny forms the foundation for telling us the who?, what?, when?, and why? of life,” says Dr. Karl Kjer of Rutgers – State University of New Jersey. “Many previously intractable questions are now resolved, while many of the ‘revolutions’ brought about by previous analyses of smaller molecular datasets have contained errors that are now being corrected.”

Old Man Winter seems to have gone maverick in the Northern Hemisphere over the last few years. Take 2014 as an example. It’s on track to be the warmest globally in more than a century of record-keeping, with May, June, August, and September all setting…

An international team of more than 100 researchers from China, U.S., Germany, and several other countries published on Thursday the first modern roadmap of insect evolution. The unprecedented results, appearing in the U.S. journal Science, reconstructed the insect “tree of life” and answered longstanding questions about the origins and evolution of the world’s largest, most diverse animal group…”Phylogeny forms the foundation for telling us the who?, what?, when?, and why? of life,” co-author Karl Kjer, professor from Rutgers University, said in a statement.

A new study published in Nature Geoscience indicates the increased melting of Arctic sea ice is linked to colder winters in parts of Europe, Asia and North America. The study looked at a key region of Arctic ice melt in the Barents-Kara Sea, north of Scandinavia and west of Russia. It found that decreasing ice cover in this region doubles the chances of unusually cold winters across wide areas to the south and east. Jennifer Francis, a research professor at Rutgers University’s Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, was the first to suggest this link between Arctic ice loss and colder winters. “There’s only about half as much sea ice coverage in the Arctic now as there was only 30 years ago,” Francis says. “It’s been disappearing at an amazing rate…One of those regions where the ice is disappearing the fastest is [in] Barents-Kara Sea.”

They pollinate our flowers, vegetables and fruit. They spread deadly diseases. They flash in the summer night. They bore into the wood in our homes. And they serve as supper for birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals – including people. Insects are seemingly everywhere, and scientists have been striving to better grasp their history on Earth…”The Earth 480 million years ago looked more like Mars than our Earth today: nothing but rock, with no life on land. The oceans were full of life, but life out of the water is really quite challenging,” said evolutionary biologist Karl Kjer of Rutgers University in New Jersey, another of the study leaders.