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1350 light years away, in the constellation of Orion (the Hunter), lies a dense and active star formation factory called the Orion Molecular Cloud 1 (OMC-1), part of the same complex as the famous Orion Nebula. Stars are born when a cloud of gas hundreds of times more massive than our Sun begins to collapse under its own gravity. In the densest regions, protostars ignite and begin to drift about randomly. Over time, some stars begin to fall toward a common centre of gravity, which is usually dominated by a particularly large protostar — and if the stars have a close encounter before they can escape their stellar nursery, violent interactions can occur.
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Many long-lived birds, such as swans, albatrosses or indeed, puffins, are known for their long-lived, monogamous, ‘soulmate’ pairings. Scientists have long understood that in these species, reproductive performance is influenced by pair bond strength and longevity, with long-established pairs usually better at rearing offspring. However, in species like puffins which have to migrate to distant wintering grounds during the non-breeding season, very little is known about how mates maintain their pair-bond and behave. Do they keep in contact to maintain their relationship? Or do they go their own way and abandon their mate until the following spring?
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To find out how rising temperatures could affect species diversity, biologists from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the Leipzig University have developed a simple experiment: they covered the bottom of different Petri dishes with litter material, then put in two species of springtails, that is, arthropods only a few millimetres in size, and then added mites feeding on springtails. Subsequently, for some of the Petri dishes they increased the ambient temperature from originally 13.5°C to 18.5°C and for some other Petri dishes to 23.5°C. In those Petri dishes, the temperatures were hence five, respectively ten degrees higher than the conditions to which the animals had been exposed to in long-term cultures over years. This created simplified miniature ecosystems under climate change conditions, in which the springtail species that peacefully coexist in the wild represented the prey, and the mites represented the predators. For two months, the researchers then observed how the interactions between the three species would develop with different temperatures.
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