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Some are dreading the arrival of millions of Brood X cicadas across Tennessee but one expert hopes people will share his fascination for the big-eyed bugs.
Need a challenging new neighborhood route in L.A.? Head to Silver Lake for this tough 16-mile walking/running route that includes 40 historic staircases. And it counts only if you go
up the stairs. Cameron Kruse, 31, created the route (and the rules) because he was looking for close-to-home adventures to get him through the pandemic.
His quests usually take him to rock faces to climb, or the Himalayas, where he photographs and works on digital storytelling, something he calls “scrollytelling.” “My day job is a creative technologist. I figure out ways to tell stories with technology, but I moonlight as a National Geographic explorer,” the rock climber and runner said.
While some may dread the arrival of the noisy, big-eyed bugs, one expert hopes people will help track their emergence. Cicada Safari, an app first launched in 2019, helps users document and learn about periodical cicadas as they spread across the United States.
Gene Kritsky, a periodical cicada expert and dean of Behavioral and Natural Sciences at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, helped develop the app. Researchers were especially limited by COVID-19 restrictions in spring 2020, Kritsky said. But the app spurred on thousands of records of periodical cicadas including some in unexpected places or off their usual schedule. Last year, we had not one but four broods emerge off-cycle, he said. We wouldn t have had any of that without the app.
Botanical Society of America
Within the past decade, next-generation sequencing technologies have revolutionized the way in which genetic data are generated and analyzed. In the field of phylogenetics, this has meant that researchers are rapidly reconstructing the tree of life, a goal that biologists have been working toward since Darwin sketched the first phylogeny in his notebook in 1837.
Yet despite the relative ease with which DNA can now be sequenced in large quantities, scientists must first extract that DNA from an organism, often relying on vast numbers of curated specimens in museums and herbaria. With over 250,000 species in the plant kingdom alone, the acquisition and documentation of specimen material is now by far the most time-consuming and error-prone process in large studies.