23 October 2017
Birds will sometimes care for the offspring of other birds of their own species if they anticipate future benefits. Being tolerated in another bird’s territory and the chance to inherit that territory later are considered rewards for which some birds are willing to postpone their own chance of reproduction. On 23 October 2017 veni researcher Sjouke Kingma from the University of Groningen has published an article on this subject in Nature Communications.
2 June 2017
Biomass and nitrogen concentration, those are the keywords for a successful application of winter cover crop mixtures. The positive effects of cover crops on soil quality is recognised for some time now, however the potential benefits of mixtures over monoculture cover crops received little attention to date. In Journal of Applied Ecology scientists from Wageningen University & Research demonstrate that the productivity of a next main crop can be manipulated through the choice of species in a preceding winter cover crop mixture.
1 June 2017
The first Dutch laboratory on Antarctica was opened in January 2013 by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science thanks to good collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey. After four years of research the journal Deep-Sea Research has published an overview of the results so far with the focus on research into the marine ecosystem. The publication makes it very clear how special the Anglo-Dutch collaboration in this field is.
12 May 2017
How do the two sexes come about? The answer to this question is more complex than one would expect. Though sexual reproduction invariably depends on the presence of male and female individuals, the genetic basis of sex determination varies strongly between species. This diversity is particularly evident in houseflies. This insect order provides an excellent model to study how different sex-determining mechanisms have evolved. Research groups in Zurich, Groningen and Göttingen now have important new findings to report in the prestigious scientific journal Science. They have identified the gene for maleness in houseflies.
8 February 2017
The left side of the spinal cord matures slightly faster than the right side in human embryos of four to eight weeks age. This is the earliest left-right difference of development in the human nervous system yet discovered. An international team led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour revealed this by studying the activity levels of many genes.
