A Stanford-led model suggests that magma oceans can slowly replenish gases lost to space, explaining how some extremely hot rocky exoplanets may retain atmospheres for billions of years.
Researchers reconstructed the banana family’s ancestral chromosome arrangement, inferring a haploid set of 17 and tracing how repeated rearrangements produced the smaller chromosome sets found in living lineages. The study also found links between chromosome-rearrangement regions and genes involved in bract coloration.
Warmer air gives tropical cyclones more moisture to work with, but researchers found that a growing saturation deficit can make storms less efficient at turning that moisture into rain. The mechanism helps explain why some models project smaller rainfall increases than expected.