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A group of researchers led by Brazilians has used an innovative model to map gaps in the Amazon rainforest and identify factors that contribute to tree mortality. Water stress, soil fertility, and anthropic forest degradation have the most influence on gap dynamics in the world's largest and most biodiverse tropical rainforest, according to an article on the study published in Scientific Reports. Forest gaps are most frequent in the areas with the highest levels of soil fertility, possibly [...]

A Brazilian study published in Nature Communications shows that human activities have directly or indirectly caused biodiversity and biomass losses in over 80% of the remaining Atlantic Rainforest fragments. According to the authors, in terms of carbon storage, the biomass erosion corresponds to the destruction of 70,000 square kilometers (km²) of forest - almost 10 million soccer pitches - or USD 2.3 billion-USD 2.6 billion in carbon credits. "These figures have direct implications [...]

The devastating effects of human activity on wildlife in the American tropics over the last 500 years are revealed in a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports. More than half of the species in local 'assemblages' - sets of co-existing species—of medium and large mammals living in the Neotropics of Meso and South America have died out since the region was first colonised by Europeans in the 1500s. Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA), in the UK, and [...]

Fossil remains of a novel species of lizard that lived more than 130 million years ago have been found in the north of Minas Gerais, Brazil. It has been named Neokotus sanfranciscanus and is the oldest representative of the order Squamata ever found in South America. Squamates are the largest reptile group, comprising lizards, snakes and amphisbaenians (worm lizards). The discovery shows that scaled lizards were present on the continent at least 20 million years earlier than previously [...]

The hypothesis that the Solar System was born from a gigantic cloud of gas and dust was first floated in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was proposed by German philosopher Immanuel Kant and developed by French mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace. It is now a consensus among astronomers. Thanks to the enormous amount of observational data, theoretical input and computational resources now available, it has been continually refined, but this is not a linear process. Nor is it [...]

The analysis of marine sediments has become a powerful research method in paleoclimatology. The composition of the sediments carried by rivers from the mainland to the ocean can be used as a basis for calculating variables such as temperature, precipitation and marine salinity. In the context of ongoing global climate change, the study of the past is fundamental to validating the accuracy of the climate models used to make predictions. A novel method of sediment analysis was proposed by [...]

The tube anemone Isarachnanthus nocturnus is only 15 cm long but has the largest mitochondrial genome of any animal sequenced to date, with 80,923 base pairs. The human mitochondrial genome (mitogenome), for example, comprises 16,569 base pairs. Tube anemones (Ceriantharia) are the focus of an article recently published in Scientific Reports describing the findings of a study led by Sérgio Nascimento Stampar, a professor in São Paulo State University's School of Sciences and [...]

The tropical forests of the Andes and Brazil's Atlantic Rainforest biome are separated by almost 1,000 km of drier areas with open vegetation in the Chaco, Cerrado (Brazilian savanna), and Caatinga (Brazilian semiarid) biomes. Today, these tropical forests are not connected, but the fact that they share closely related species and lineages suggests that these biomes were connected in the past. For example, 23 rainforest bird species have been found in both the Andean and Atlantic tropical [...]

In the past three decades, almost 4,000 planet-like objects have been discovered orbiting isolated stars outside the Solar System (exoplanets). Beginning in 2011, it was possible to use NASA's Kepler Space Telescope to observe the first exoplanets in orbit around young binary systems of two live stars with hydrogen still burning in their core. Brazilian astronomers have now found the first evidence of the existence of an exoplanet orbiting an older or more evolved binary in which one of the [...]