Farmers should worry about how many individual wild bees they have pollinating their fields, not how many kinds of bees, according to new research… In their study of fruit plants in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California, ecologist Rachael Winfree and her coauthors find that the abundance of a few dominant species of wild bee is more important than the diversity of bee species pollinating crops… “This is not to say that biodiversity is unimportant- far from it,” says Winfree, an associate professor of ecology, evolution, and natural resources in the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.
Olive Oil Compound Kills Cancer Cells in Minutes
An ingredient in extra-virgin olive oil kills a variety of human cancer cells without harming healthy ones… “We needed to determine if oleocanthal was targeting that protein and causing the cells to die,” says Paul Breslin, professor of nutritional sciences in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers and coauthor of a new study published in Molecular and Cellular Oncology… After applying oleocanthal to the cancer cells, the researchers discovered that the cancer cells were dying very quickly- within 30 minutes to an hour. Programmed cell death takes between 16 and 24 hours, so the scientists realized that something else had to be causing the cancer cells to break down and die.