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Topics: Natural science

  • Live cell imaging using a smartphone

    A recent study from Uppsala University shows how smartphones can be used to make movies of living cells, without the need for expensive equipment. The study is published in the open access journal PLOS ONE, making it possible for laboratories around the world to do the same thing.

  • Localised immunotherapy new possibility to treat bladder cancer

    Antibody-based immunotherapy is a new promising method to treat cancer. Unfortunately, today’s treatments can result in adverse side effects. New findings from Uppsala University show an alternative way to administer the therapy, which has the same effect on the tumour but less impact other parts of the body.

  • Watching how plants make oxygen

    In a new study, an international team of researchers made significant progress in visualizing the process how plants split water to produce oxygen. The results are published in Nature.

  • Tadpoles turn to vegetarian diets under heat waves

    Of the many ecological questions unfolded by climate change, the potential influence of temperature on the feeding preferences of organisms is currently gathering a great deal of attention in the scientific community. In a new study, published in the journal Ecology, researchers show that three species of tadpoles generally increased herbivory under simulated heat wave scenarios.

  • Popcorn-rocks solve the mystery of the magma chambers

    Since the 18th century, geologists have struggled to explain how big magma chambers form in the Earth’s crust. In particular, it has been difficult to explain where the surrounding rock goes when the magma intrudes. Now a team of researchers from Uppsala University and the Goethe University in Frankfurt have found the missing rocks – and they look nothing like what they expected.

  • Early fossil fish from China shows where our jaws came from

    Where did our jaws come from? The question is more complicated than it seems, because not all jaws are the same. In a new article, published in Science, palaeontologists from China and Sweden trace our jaws back to the extinct placoderms, armoured prehistoric fish that lived over 400 million years ago.

  • Ancient fish illuminates one of the mysteries of childhood

    Remember dropping your milk teeth? In your hand was only the enamel-covered crown: the entire root of the tooth had somehow disappeared. In a paper published in Nature, a team of researchers from Uppsala University and the ESRF apply synchrotron x-ray tomography to a tiny jawbone of a 424 million year old fossil fish in order to illuminate the origin of this strange system of tooth replacement.

  • Magma movements foretell future eruptions

    Geologists at Uppsala University have traced magma movement beneath Mt. Cameroon volcano, which will help monitoring for future volcanic eruptions. The results are published in Scientific Reports.

  • Roundworms even more useful than researchers previously thought

    The one millimetre long roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans has been used as a model organism in scientific research, and has therefore been extensively examined. A research group at Uppsala University has now demonstrated that the worm is an even more complete model system than previously thought, which could enable more detailed research into areas such as early embryonic development.

  • Eat, escape, love: the price of looking sexy

    In the animal kingdom colourful traits can be both a blessing and a curse. A new study from a group of researchers at Uppsala University has studied the conspicuous wing coloration of two species of damselflies. Their results imply that males, but not females, pay a high cost when using colour to communicate with other damselflies, both in terms of predation risk and visibility to prey.

  • Life history of the 360 million-year-old Acanthostega rewrites the tetrapod move on land

    This week in Nature, an international team of researchers shows that fossils of the 360 million-year-old tetrapod Acanthostega, one of the iconic transitional forms between fishes and land animals, are not grown-ups but all juveniles. This conclusion sheds new light on the life cycle of Acanthostega and the so-called conquest of land by tetrapods.

  • Flycatcher genome sheds light on causes of mutations

    A research team at Uppsala University has determined the complete genetic code of 11 members of a flycatcher pedigree. Doing this, they have for the first time been able to estimate the rate of new mutations in birds. When they combined the new results with mutation rate estimates from other organisms, a clear pattern emerged: The more common a species is, the lower its mutation rate.

  • Forensic DNA analysis checks the origin of cultured cells

    Cell lines are cultured cells that are commonly used in medical research. New results from Uppsala University show that such cells are not always what they are assumed to be. Using genetic analyses, the researchers showed that a commonly used cell line which was established in Uppsala almost fifty years ago does not originate from the patient it is claimed to stem from.

  • How honeybees do without males

    An isolated population of honeybees in South Africa, the Cape bees, has evolved a strategy to reproduce without males. A team of researchers at Uppsala University and in South Africa has sequenced the entire genomes of a sample of Cape bees and compared them with other populations of honeybees to find out the genetic mechanisms behind their asexual reproduction.

  • Microplastic particles threaten fish larvae

    In a new study, published in Science, researchers from Uppsala University found that larval fish exposed to microplastic particles during development displayed changed behaviors and stunted growth which lead to greatly increased mortality rates. Larval perch that had access to microplastic particles only ate plastic and ignored their natural food source of free-swimming zooplankton.

  • ​New method to create terahertz radiation advances materials science

    Uppsala physicists have in an international collaboration developed a new method for creating laser pulses which are shorter, have much higher intensity and cover the THz frequency range better than current sources. The study is published today in the authoritative journal Nature Photonics and is of great importance to materials research.

  • Why animals court their own sex

    Same-sex sexual behavior is common in animals but puzzles evolutionary biologists since it doesn’t carry the same obvious benefits as heterosexual courtship behavior that leads to mating and production of offspring. A study from Uppsala University sheds new light on the pervasiveness of same-sex sexual behavior in the animal kingdom.

  • Coral death stops fish from learning predators

    In a world first study researchers have found that coral bleaching and death can have dramatic repercussions for how small reef fish learn about and avoid predators. The new results are published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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