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When deciding what crops to grow during a season, growers look at several factors. Do the crops have a good yield in their area? Does the area currently have the resources - usually water - to grow that crop? Will the crop give a return on the investment? And, what are the future effects that growing that crop might have on the grower’s fields?

The battery might be the least sexy piece of technology ever invented. The lack of glamour is especially conspicuous on the lower floors of MIT’s materials science department, where one lab devoted to building and testing the next world-changing energy storage device could easily be mistaken for a storage closet.

Hebrew University researchers describe how infectious bacteria sense they’re attached to intestinal cells and remodel their gene expression to exploit our cells and colonize our gut.

Of all the fishy predators in the Great Lakes, few are more destructive than the sea lamprey. There’s something of a horror movie in their approach: jawless, they attach to prey such as salmon, whitefish or trout with a sucker mouth and drain the victim of its blood and lymph.

For years, scientists and policy-makers have been trying to devise strategies to curb this population, which first arrived from Europe through shipping channels in the early 20th century.

Scientists have gotten better at predicting where earthquakes will occur, but they’re still in the dark about when they will strike and how devastating they will be.