From little penguins to (very big) cassowaries, every bird has its fans. Vote for your favourite in the 2025 Guardian/BirdLife Australia poll

Plants produce a remarkable spectrum of specialized metabolites that shape ecological interactions with other organisms and enable environmental adaptation. Deciphering the biosynthesis and function of these metabolites can unlock fundamental resources for crop optimization and synthetic biology platforms to advance the production of food and plant-derived pharmaceuticals and other bioproducts.

Humans are driving biodiversity change, which also alters community functional traits. However, how changes in the functional traits of the community alter ecosystem functions—especially belowground...

Telomeric sequences vary across the tree of life and intimately co-evolve with telomere-binding protein complexes. However, the molecular mechanisms allowing organisms to adapt to new telomeric sequen...

Quantitative traits provide insights into how phenotypes evolve across species. However, standard comparative methods often assume a single species tree and overlook the discordant gene tree histories...

Our current carbon economy relies on fossil fuels, from which we isolate small organic molecules to produce medicines, plastics, cosmetic, or other chemicals that we use everyday. However, sustainability requires a more biomass-based carbon economy, where we engineer plants to produce precursor molecules, which can then be assembled to desired chemicals that we use daily. Plants have evolved an amazing diversity of metabolites, but these metabolites are not produced in every cell of the plant. Therefore, it is essential to understand how plants can express different metabolic pathways across different organs, tissues, and even cell types. We are interested in the following questions: How are metabolic pathways (especially specialized metabolism) controlled by cell fate? How can we reprogram plant cell fates for biomanufacturing? How can we toggle between differentiated cell states for metabolic engineering and totipotent cell state for genetic engineering?

Bill Nye the Science Guy on Monday protested against a federal budget proposal that would see NASA's funding reduced from $24 billion to $18.8 billion.