Category: 7. Science

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), marks a milestone in reproductive science, opening the door to potential future applications in fertility medicine and genetic research.

The team, led by Professor Yanchang Wei, achieved this result by injecting sperm from two male mice into an egg cell that had been stripped of its maternal DNA. Crucially, they applied a method known as epigenome editing, which reprograms gene activity without altering the DNA sequence itself.

“We attempted to improve the development of androgenetic embryos by restoring the epigenetic status of these ICRs [imprinting control regions],” the researchers wrote.

Out of 259 embryos implanted into surrogate female mice, only three pups were born, and two survived into adulthood. Despite the low 0.8% success rate, both surviving mice were able to reproduce normally, proving their fertility and general health.

“Our efforts enabled us to generate androgenetic mice that can develop to adulthood and are fertile, using the genetic materials derived from two sperm cells,” the scientists noted.

This research is based on overcoming genetic imprinting, a process in which chemical labels on DNA determine which genes are active in a given embryo. Normally, imprinting is balanced between maternal and paternal chromosomes, but this balance is disrupted when both sets of chromosomes come from the same sex, often leading to developmental failure.

While scientists managed to generate viable embryos from two female mice as early as 2004, replicating this process with two male mice had remained elusive due to the complexity of correcting paternal imprinting patterns. Wei’s team solved this by targeting and modifying seven key ICRs known to be essential for development.

Despite the promising results in mice, the road to human application remains long and uncertain. “Although the efficiency is low at present, this finding may be an important step toward achieving mammalian androgenesis,” the authors acknowledged. Experts also caution that the low success rate, ethical concerns, and regulatory restrictions make it unlikely that similar techniques will be applied to human embryos in the near future.

Earlier, it was reported that an American scientist achieved a significant breakthrough in understanding how axolotls – Mexican salamanders known for their remarkable regenerative abilities – are able to regrow limbs and organs.

Scientists at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have developed a solution that prevents fusion reactors from overheating, Phys.org reported.

The breakthrough centers on a clever design called the X-point target radiator. This innovation adds a second magnetic control point to tokamak fusion reactors, creating a safety valve that sheds dangerous excess heat before it can damage the reactor walls.

Fusion reactors face a massive heat management problem. These doughnut-shaped devices, called tokamaks, use powerful magnetic fields to contain plasma heated to over 100 million degrees Celsius. When this superhot plasma touches the reactor walls, it can cause severe damage that shortens the reactor’s lifespan and hurts performance.

The Swiss research team discovered that adding a secondary X-point along the reactor’s heat exhaust channel creates localized radiation that pulls heat away from sensitive areas. Think of it like adding a second drain to prevent your bathtub from overflowing.

“Reducing divertor heat loads is a key challenge for future fusion power plants,” Kenneth Lee, first author of the paper, told Phys.org.

The EPFL team used its TCV tokamak’s unique magnetic shaping abilities to test this concept. Experiments showed the X-point target radiator stays stable across a range of operating conditions, making it much more reliable than previous heat management approaches.

Watch now: How bad is a gas stove for your home’s indoor air quality?

“We found that the X-point target radiator is highly stable and can be sustained over a wide range of operational conditions, potentially offering a much more reliable method for handling power exhaust in a fusion power plant,” Lee said.

Fusion energy could change how we power our world. Unlike coal and gas, fusion creates massive amounts of electricity without producing harmful gases or long-lived radioactive waste. A single fusion plant could power entire cities on fuel extracted from seawater.

The X-point target radiator makes fusion power plants more practical by solving the overheating problem that has plagued reactor designs. This means fusion plants could run longer and more efficiently, reducing electricity costs for everyone.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plan to include the X-point target design in their upcoming SPARC reactor, which looks to demonstrate commercial fusion power.

Diversifying our energy sources with fusion power would dramatically reduce air pollution from coal and gas plants. Cleaner air means fewer respiratory problems, heart disease cases, and premature deaths in communities near power plants.

Fusion power could slash electricity bills once the technology scales up. The fuel comes from abundant hydrogen isotopes found in seawater, making long-term operating costs extremely low.

Cities and companies investing in fusion power could reap major savings compared to volatile coal and gas prices. The stable costs of fusion electricity would help businesses plan budgets and keep energy affordable for residents.

The SPARC reactor incorporating this heat management technology is scheduled for testing in the coming years. If successful, commercial fusion plants using the X-point target radiator could begin operating in the 2030s.

The researchers will continue refining their approach with high-power experiments and simulations.

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Microplastics are truly everywhere. As the World Economic Forum explained, these tiny plastic particles measuring 5 millimeters or less have been found across land, oceans, the air, and throughout our food chain. They’ve also been detected in human blood and in the brain. We still don’t know much about how they actually impact human health. However, a new study suggests that microplastics could have an unexpected effect: making foodborne illnesses even more dangerous than before. 

In April, researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign published their study findings in the Journal of Nanobiotechnology, examining how nanoplastics, which are a mere 1  micrometer wide or smaller, react when they come into contact with foodborne pathogens, specifically E. coli O157:H7, a particularly harmful strain that can cause serious illness in humans.

“Other studies have evaluated the interaction of nanoplastics and bacteria, but so far, ours is the first to look at the impacts of microplastics and nanoplastics on human pathogenic bacteria,” the study’s senior author, Pratik Banerjee, who is also an associate professor in the department of food science and human nutrition and an Illinois Extension Specialist, shared in a statement.

Using three types of polystyrene-based nanoplastics — one with a positive charge, one with a negative charge, and one with no charge at all — the team discovered that these nanoparticles can significantly influence how bacteria grow, survive, and even how dangerous they become. In particular, those exposed to a positive charge.

That’s because the positive charge caused a “bacteriostatic” effect, which slowed but did not stop the E. coli from growing. Instead, it adapted, resumed growth, and formed biofilms, which make bacteria harder to kill.

“Just as a stressed dog is more likely to bite, the stressed bacteria became more virulent, pumping out more Shiga-like toxin, the chemical that causes illness in humans,” Banerjee said. 

The researcher noted that these biofilms form a “very robust bacterial structure and are hard to eradicate,” emphasizing that their goal was to observe what occurs “when this human pathogen, which is commonly transmitted via food, encounters these nanoplastics from the vantage point of a biofilm.”

Although the research doesn’t suggest that micro- and nanoplastics are the only cause of foodborne illness outbreaks, they point out that interactions like the ones they observed “lead to enhanced survival of pathogens with increased virulence traits.”

This isn’t the only study highlighting the effects of microplastics on bacteria. In March, researchers from Boston University published their findings in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, which showed that bacteria exposed to microplastics could become resistant to “multiple types of antibiotics commonly used to treat infections.” 

They also specifically studied how E. coli (this time using MG1655, a non-pathogenic laboratory strain) reacted to microplastics, and, as Neila Gross, a PhD candidate in materials science and engineering and the lead author of the study, shared, “The plastics provide a surface that the bacteria attach to and colonize.” On those surfaces, Gross and her team also found that they created that dangerous biofilm, which “supercharged the bacterial biofilms,” making it impossible for antibiotics to penetrate. 

“We found that the biofilms on microplastics, compared to other surfaces like glass, are much stronger and thicker, like a house with a ton of insulation,” Gross added. “It was staggering to see.” 

Furthermore, the BU team pointed out that while microplastics are everywhere, they are especially problematic in lower-income areas of the world that may lack the ability to control pollution flow. 

“The fact that there are microplastics all around us, and even more so in impoverished places where sanitation may be limited, is a striking part of this observation,” Muhammad Zaman, a BU College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering who studies antimicrobial resistance and refugee and migrant health, added. “There is certainly a concern that this could present a higher risk in communities that are disadvantaged, and only underscores the need for more vigilance and a deeper insight into [microplastic and bacterial] interactions.”

Since its debut in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope has dazzled viewers with its infrared images of galaxies, nebulae, stars, and even our own solar system’s planets.

Now, the most expensive telescope ever made has unveiled a new trick—a coronagraph, which allows it to block the light of a star and see what small objects are orbiting it. In this case, it performed the first direct photographing of an exoplanet in human history; probably.

The image found a faint source of infrared light in a disk of debris orbiting TWA 7, a red dwarf star around 111 light years from Earth. With the outstanding chance of the object being a background galaxy at more than 0%, the researchers can’t say for certain it’s a planet, but they suspect very much that it is—around the size of Saturn and sitting at a comfortable 120° Fahrenheit.

Though astronomers have detected well over 5,000 exoplanets so far, each one has been done through indirect methods, such as the “transit method.” The transit method sees an astronomer train a telescope on a star, and monitor for predictable drops in the level of light from the star that would indicate a planet orbiting it. The transit method can also work through measurements of gravity since passing planets’ gravitational fields can cause their host stars to “wobble.”

By contrast, the coronagraph will be much more straight forward, and TWA 7 b will likely be the first of many that the Webb telescope will discover.

One can think of the coronagraph as an on-demand eclipse service. The instrument positions a disk inside the lens of the imaging device to perfectly eliminate the star’s light from entering the sensor within a degree of micrometers. With the pollution of the star’s light gone, small things—in this case an exoplanet—can be seen.

RECENT WORK FROM JAMES WEBB 

“Our observations reveal a strong candidate for a planet shaping the structure of the TWA 7 debris disk, and its position is exactly where we expected to find a planet of this mass,” Anne-Marie Lagrange, lead author of the study and an astrophysicist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said in a statement released by NASA on the discovery.

The source is located in a gap in one of three dust rings that were discovered around TWA 7 by previous ground-based observations. The object’s brightness, color, distance from the star, and position within the ring are consistent with theoretical predictions for a young, cold, Saturn-mass planet that is expected to be sculpting the surrounding debris disk.

These visible rings or gaps are thought to be created by planets that have formed around the star, but such a planet has yet to be directly detected within a debris disk. If TWA 7 b is confirmed to be such, it would mark a major moment in astronomy.

SHARE This Great New Trick From Our Expensive Space Telescope… 

A new study using images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has helped to answer a continuous question in astronomy.

Astronomers have been able to identify both thin and thick stellar disks in galaxies, extending far beyond our local universe, with some dating back 10 billion years

The research was led by an international team and recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It analysed 111 edge-on galaxies captured by JWST. These galaxies were positioned in a way that allowed their vertical structure to be studied in detail, enabling scientists to see their internal layering like never before.

Two stellar disks, two histories

Many disk galaxies, including the Milky Way, are composed of two key components: a thick disk and a thin disk. The thick disk contains older, metal-poor stars, while the thin disk hosts younger, metal-rich stars. These distinct parts offer clues to the history of star formation and chemical enrichment in galaxies.

Until the launch of JWST in 2021, only nearby galaxies could be studied in this level of detail. Older telescopes lacked the resolution to observe the thin edges of distant galaxies. But JWST’s sharp imaging capabilities have now made it possible to explore the vertical structure of galaxies billions of light-years away, essentially allowing astronomers to look back in time.

Galactic evolution through times

The analysis of the JWST images revealed a clear evolutionary pattern. In the earlier universe, galaxies appeared to have only a thick disk. As time went on, more galaxies developed a second, thinner disk nestled within the thick one. This sequence suggests a two-step formation process: galaxies initially formed a thick disk during their early, chaotic stages, and later developed a thin disk as they matured.

The team found that the thin disks in galaxies similar in size to the Milky Way began forming about 8 billion years ago. This timeline matches with existing data on our galaxy, suggesting that the Milky Way’s formation history may be more typical than previously thought.

Gas, turbulence, and the birth of stars

To understand how these disks formed, the researchers also examined data from the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and other ground-based observatories. These observations focused on the motion of gas, the raw material from which stars are born.

In the early universe, galaxies were gas-rich and highly turbulent. This chaotic environment fueled rapid star formation, resulting in the formation of thick stellar disks. Over time, the stars themselves helped stabilise the gas, calming the turbulence. This quieter environment allowed for the gradual buildup of a thin, more orderly disk within the thick one.

Massive galaxies, with more gas and stronger gravitational pull, were able to form thin disks earlier than smaller galaxies. This suggests that galaxy mass plays a crucial role in shaping the development of disk structures.

When thinking about fossils, we often picture dinosaurs. But reefs can also hold an ancient history. Tiny fish bones and shark scales also become fossils in these habitats, quietly preserving the story of ancient oceans.

A striking study from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) has now revealed how humans disrupted Caribbean reefs in the past.

Scientists analyzed fossilized coral reefs from Panama’s Bocas del Toro and the Dominican Republic. These reefs, exposed and well-preserved, date back 7,000 years.

Humans changed reef fish communities

The researchers compared the fossilized reefs with nearby living reefs to reveal how overfishing changed fish communities.

In the ancient reef sediments, the team found thousands of fossilized otoliths (fish ear bones) and dermal denticles (shark scales).

These fossils gave clues to species composition and size. The results show a massive shift in predator-prey dynamics, unlike anything seen before.

One of the most alarming findings was a 75% drop in shark numbers. These top predators once played a key role in maintaining reef balance. As their numbers fell, populations of prey fish surged. They doubled in abundance and increased 17% in size.

The predator release effect

The study offers hard evidence for the “predator release effect.” Scientists had long predicted this outcome, but they lacked solid prehistoric data to prove it.

Now, the fossils confirm what models once assumed: removing predators lets prey populations explode.

Meanwhile, fish targeted by humans, like larger groupers and snappers, became 22% smaller. This shrinking trend matches what we observe today.

Overfishing seems to have pushed these species toward early maturity and smaller size.

Some fish stay the same

Remains from tiny cryptobenthic reef fishes, which live in coral crevices, told a different story. Their size and abundance remained unchanged over thousands of years.

Despite fishing and upheaval above them, these reef dwellers stayed stable. Their resilience surprised the researchers.

“The stability of these fish shows remarkable resistance to external pressures,” noted the researchers. Even as top predators vanished and fishing intensified, these hidden species kept going, unchanged.

To measure these shifts, the scientists examined 807 shark denticles and 5,724 otoliths. They also studied coral branches for bite marks left by damselfish.

Fossil and modern samples showed that damselfish now bite more often – likely because they face fewer predators.

Fish bones reveal big reef changes

Otoliths grow in layers like tree rings. This allows scientists to estimate the age and size of fish at time of death. By comparing fossil otoliths with modern ones, researchers could track size changes across millennia.

Dermal denticles, the scale-like structures on shark skin, helped identify shark presence. These tiny features tell a big story: as shark numbers decreased, populations of prey species expanded.

Bite marks from damselfish also gave insights. These aggressive little fish defend territories and leave distinct marks. More bites today means more damselfish – again pointing to the effects of predator loss.

Tracing reef fish history with fossils

This fossil evidence gives scientists a rare and valuable baseline. It shows how Caribbean reef fish communities looked before human fishing began to alter their structure.

Without such deep-time context, conservation efforts often rely on incomplete or recent data that miss the full picture of ecological change.

Now, researchers and reef managers can clearly see which parts of the reef ecosystem shifted due to human influence – and which components, like tiny reef-sheltered fish, remained stable across millennia.

“This study demonstrates the power of the fossil record for future conservation,” the researchers stated.

Long-term impacts of human activity

These 7,000-year-old fossils give us a clearer view of the long-term impacts of human activity on reef food webs, fish sizes, and predator-prey dynamics.

They also help identify which reef species and relationships are most at risk from continued pressure.

By looking back in time through the fossil record, scientists gain crucial insight to guide better decisions in reef conservation, fishing policies, and biodiversity management today.

The research was a collaboration among top institutions including the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), the Marine Science Institute at the University of Texas, Austin, and the Center for Biodiversity Outcomes at Arizona State University.

The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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• The Andromeda galaxy is the nearest large galaxy to our own Milky Way. It is 2.5 million light-years from us.
• NASA has released a new composite image of Andromeda, combining images from multiple telescopes taken in various wavelengths.
• There is also a sonification of the composite image, where the different individual images are converted into sound.

A new composite of the Andromeda galaxy

The Andromeda galaxy is the nearest large galaxy to our own Milky Way. It is also a spiral galaxy, similar to the Milky Way, so by studying it, astronomers can learn more about our home galaxy as well. On June 25, 2025, NASA released a beautiful new composite image of Andromeda. The composite combines images and data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, XMM-Newton, the retired GALEX and Spitzer telescopes, the Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS), COBE, Planck, Herschel and Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT). The various telescopes observed Andromeda in multiple wavelengths, including X-ray, infrared, ultraviolet, optical and radio waves.

The different wavelengths provide astronomers with their own unique details about the galaxy. This includes X-ray radiation around the supermassive black hole in the center of Andromeda.

In addition, the astronomers also released the data as a sonification – turning the data into sound – using the same wavelengths.

NASA dedicated the new Andromeda image to the late astronomer Vera Rubin.

Andromeda observed in various wavelengths

Andromeda is a massive spiral galaxy, much like our own Milky Way. At 2.5 million light-years away, it is the closest galaxy to our own, apart from the Milky Way’s smaller satellite galaxies. We can’t see our own galaxy like we do Andromeda, because we are embedded within it. Rather, our view is from the inside looking out instead of the outside looking in. So with this in mind, astronomers can study Andromeda for clues about how the Milky Way formed billions of years ago.

Like other spiral galaxies, Andromeda looks like a flattened disk. And, just like our Milky Way, it has spiraling arms of gas and dust arcing around a bright center. In each separate image, the orientation of Andromeda is the same. But the colors and other details are different depending on the wavelength the image was taken in.

For example, in radio waves, the spiral arms appear red and orange. But in contrast, the center of the galaxy is black and featureless. The outer spiral arms are a similar color in infrared, too. But you can also see a white spiraling ring around a blue center with a small golden core. In optical, the galaxy looks more gray and hazy. A small bright dot is visible in the center of the galaxy. Meanwhile, in ultraviolet, the spiral arms have an icy hue in blue and white. The dot in the center now looks like a hazy white ball.

Sonification of the Andromeda galaxy. Here, the images in the composite from different wavelengths are converted into sound. Video via NASA/ CXC/ SAO/ K.Arcand/ SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo/ A. Santaguida).

The Andromeda galaxy, now with sound!

The sonification of Andromeda is featured in a 30-second video. It includes all the same data as the images, but the researchers separated out the image layer from each telescope. Then they rotated each layer and stacked them horizontally. The sequence is X-rays at the top and then ultraviolet, optical, infrared and radio. Subsequently, the researchers scanned the images from left to right, mapping each type of wavelength to a different series of acoustic notes. The mapping moves from low-energy wavelengths up to the highest, which are the X-rays.

The vertical location determines the pitch, while the brightness controls the volume.

#PPOD: The Andromeda galaxy, also known as Messier 31 (M31), is a glittering beacon in this image released on June 25, 2025, in tribute to the groundbreaking legacy of astronomer Dr. Vera Rubin, whose observations transformed our understanding of the universe. ? ? ???

— SETI Institute (@setiinstitute.bsky.social) 2025-06-27T15:02:14.599Z

The legacy of Dr. Vera Rubin

In addition, NASA has dedicate the new composite image of Andromeda to the late astronomer Vera Rubin. Rubin’s extensive observations of the universe included Andromeda. Her measurements of Andromeda’s rotation helped to show that galaxies are embedded in dark matter. Dark matter is the mysterious, invisible form of matter that scientists say 27% of the universe is composed of. Dark energy makes up 68% and only the remaining 5% is the ordinary matter in the universe that we can see with our own eyes.

And, speaking of Rubin, the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile just released its first stunning images of the universe. Check them out here!

Bottom line: NASA has released a stunning new composite image of the Andromeda galaxy. There is also a sonification, where the individual images are converted into sound.

Via NASA

Read more: See the first Rubin Observatory images here!

Read more: Millions of new solar system objects, now in technicolor!

Northern lights could put on a show tonight (July 2) as an incoming coronal mass ejection (CME) could spark a geomagnetic storm, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

A CME released on June 28 is due to impact Earth sometime today. It’s possible that this CME could sweep up a slower CME released the day prior, on June 27, according to the U.K. Met Office. The resulting solar storm could disrupt Earth’s magnetic field, which in turn can lead to geomagnetic storms and striking auroras.

Some 252 million years ago, almost all life on Earth disappeared.

Known as the Permian–Triassic mass extinction – or the Great Dying – this was the most catastrophic of the five mass extinction events recognised in the past 539 million years of our planet’s history.

Up to 94% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate families were wiped out. Tropical forests – which served, as they do today, as important carbon sinks that helped regulate the planet’s temperature – also experienced massive declines.

Scientists have long agreed this event was triggered by a sudden surge in greenhouse gases which resulted in an intense and rapid warming of Earth. But what has remained a mystery is why these extremely hot conditions persisted for millions of years.

Our new paper, published today in Nature Communications, provides an answer. The decline of tropical forests locked Earth in a hothouse state, confirming scientists’ suspicion that when our planet’s climate crosses certain “tipping points”, truly catastrophic ecological collapse can follow.

A massive eruption

The trigger for the Permian–Triassic mass extinction event was the eruption of massive amounts of molten rock in modern day Siberia, named the Siberian Traps. This molten rock erupted in a sedimentary basin, rich in organic matter.

The molten rock was hot enough to melt the surrounding rocks and release massive amounts of carbon dioxide into Earth’s atmosphere over a period as short as 50,000 years but possibly as long as 500,000 years. This rapid increase in carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere and the resulting temperature increase is thought to be the primary kill mechanism for much of life at the time.

On land it is thought surface temperatures increased by as much as 6°C to 10°C – too rapid for many life forms to evolve and adapt. In other similar eruptions, the climate system usually returns to its previous state within 100,000 to a million years.

But these “super greenhouse” conditions, which resulted in equatorial average surface temperatures upwards of 34°C (roughly 8°C warmer than the current equatorial average temperature) persisted for roughly five million years. In our study we sought to answer why.

The forests die out

We looked at the fossil record of a wide range of land plant biomes, such as arid, tropical, subtropical, temperate and scrub. We analysed how the biomes changed from just before the mass extinction event, until about eight million years after.

We hypothesised that Earth warmed too rapidly, leading to the dying out of low- to mid-latitude vegetation, especially the rainforests. As a result the efficiency of the organic carbon cycle was greatly reduced immediately after the volcanic eruptions.

Plants, because they are unable to simply get up and move, were very strongly affected by the changing conditions.

Before the event, many peat bogs and tropical and subtropical forests existed around the equator and soaked up carbon

However, when we reconstructed plant fossils from fieldwork, records and databases around the event we saw that these biomes were completely wiped out from the tropical continents. This led to a multimillion year “coal gap” in the geological record.

These forests were replaced by tiny lycopods, only two to 20 centimetres in height.

Enclaves of larger plants remained towards the poles, in coastal and in slightly mountainous regions where the temperature was slightly cooler. After about five million years they had mostly recolonised Earth. However these types of plants were also less efficient at fixing carbon in the organic carbon cycle.

This is analogous in some ways to considering the impact of replacing all rainforests at present day with the mallee-scrub and spinifex flora that we might expect to see in the Australian outback.

Finally, the forests return

Using evidence from the present day, we estimated the rate at which plants take atmospheric carbon dioxide and store it as organic matter of each different biome (or its “net primary productivity”) that was suggested in the fossil record.

We then used a recently developed carbon cycle model called SCION to test our hypothesis numerically. When we analysed our model results we found that the initial increase in temperature from the Siberian Traps was preserved for five to six million years after the event because of the reduction in net primary productivity.

It was only as plants re-established themselves and the organic carbon cycle restarted that Earth slowly started to ease out of the super greenhouse conditions.

Maintaining a climate equilibrium

It’s always difficult to draw analogies between past climate change in the geological record and what we’re experiencing today. That’s because the extent of past changes is usually measured over tens to hundreds of thousands of years while at present day we are experiencing change over decades to centuries.

A key implication of our work, however, is that life on Earth, while resilient, is unable to respond to massive changes on short time scales without drastic rewirings of the biotic landscape.

In the case of the Permian–Triassic mass extinction, plants were unable to respond on as rapid a time scale as 1,000 to 10,000 years. This resulted in a large extinction event.

Overall, our results underline how important tropical and subtropical plant biomes and environments are to maintaining a climate equilibrium. In turn, they show how the loss of these biomes can contribute to additional climate warming – and serve as a devastating climate tipping point.

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Zhen Xu was the lead author of the study, which was part of her PhD work.