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...Warmer temperatures and more humidity may have helped the forests in the region grow and expand north into present-day Siberia. The theory hinges on the presence of pollen in the region's sediment record...It is also likely that both warm and cold climates would have played a role in this travel. The Pleistocene Epoch is known for huge climatic shifts...To piece together what the climate could have looked like during a possible warm period about 45,000 to 50,000 years ago, researchers working on the study created a record of the vegetation and pollen from the Pleistocene found around Lake Baikal in...

A new study reveals how we could design robots to think like bees. Honey bees excel in weighing effort against reward and risk, quickly determining which flowers can provide sustenance for their colony. A study recently published in the journal eLife illustrates how eons of evolution have fine-tuned honey bees to make swift judgments while minimizing danger. This research sheds light on the workings of insect minds, the evolution of human cognition, and offers insights for improved robot design. The paper presents a model of decision-making in bees and outlines the paths in their brains that enable fast decision-making. The...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding the development of technology to package oral vaccines for delivery using pollen. The exterior of pollen grains are shells made of a non-allergenic, naturally durable polymer. The interior of the shell can be emptied, which eliminates any allergy-producing material, and then filled with vaccine, according to GlobalBiodefense.com. The shell’s durability also gives it a substantial advantage over traditional oral tablets because it serves to protect the vaccine while it is in the body. Stomach acids, for example, often limit a medication’s absorption. A pollen shell would protect the vaccine until it reaches...

Coughing, sneezing, runny nose, congestion, body aches, chills—obviously, you know you’re under the weather when symptoms like these appear, but how can you tell which storm it is? Certain signs could point to the common cold or flu, while others may be more serious and present as early signs of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus. Even more confusing as we head into spring? Some might simply be an indication of seasonal allergies. Here, a doctor explains how to figure out what your body may be dealing with. Allergies: runny nose + itchy eyes Welcome to spring,...

It’s a pollen-pocalypse. Stunning aerial photos show a haze of pollen so thick over Durham, North Carolina, it turned the sky yellow this week — as doctors in the region have reported an uptick in patients complaining about their allergy symptoms. “In April in North Carolina we have an overlap for a couple weeks where we have pretty high counts of tree and then grass also gets started,” Heather Gutekunst, a doctor with Allergy Partners of Raleigh, told ABC 11. “So when we see that, if you are allergic to both, we tend to see an escalation in symptoms.”

Lamar Mayor Darnell Byrd McPherson believed she was the victim of a hate crime after discovering a yellow, sticky substance on the hood of her car Police investigated after McPherson filed a report, as material was also found on her husband's car in the South Carolina town Cops later launched a probe and found that the substance was 'pollen' Before the probe McPherson said she was grateful the alleged culprits 'didn't take our lives' and hoped 'they would be identified and prosecuted'

We all live in an increasingly toxic world Do you remember the line in the musical “Showboat”, the one that says, “It’s summertime and the living is easy”? Maybe it is for some people. But the worst summer I ever endured was during World War II. We all had to contribute to the war effort and my job was to pick peaches on a farm. But for years I had suffered from Hay Fever! Peaches and their fuzz were a Perfect Storm! Could I have avoided this allergy today? It’s estimated that 40 million North Americans now suffer from mild...

One thousand years ago, on a floodplain of the Mississippi River near modern-day St. Louis, the massive Native American city known today as Cahokia sprang suddenly into existence. Three hundred years later it was virtually deserted... While analyzing cores from Horseshoe Lake, an oxbow lake that separated from the Mississippi River some 1,700 years ago, Munoz's team discovered a layer of silty clay 19 centimeters (7.5 inches) thick deposited by a massive ancient flood. It's unlikely that the ancient floodwaters were high enough to inundate the ten-story mound at Cahokia's center, a structure now called Monk's Mound... But a flood...

Here is a piece of pseudo-scientific idiocy that caught my attention. This Fox News/LiveScience article tries to claim that bumblebees are disappearing because of, you guessed it, global warming! From the article: Climate change is causing wild bumblebees to disappear from large swaths of their historical range, which could spell disaster for pollinating crops in Europe and North America, new research suggests.

Hay fever misery to increase with global warming: Invasive ragweed to spread pollen further due to climate change Climate change could help a notorious invasive weed known to trigger severe allergy attacks to spread and bring misery to hay fever sufferers, experts have warned. Ragweed, also known as Ambrosia artemisiifolia, is native to North America but since the 1960s has been spreading rapidly across warmer parts of Europe. It is still rare in the UK, but researchers predict by 2050 it could be scattering pollen throughout much of Britain and northern Europe.

Pollen Fossils Warp Evolutionary Time by Brian Thomas, M.S., & Tim Clarey, Ph.D. * Another support beam has fallen from evolution’s explanatory framework as European scientists now report the discovery of flowering plant fossils in Middle-Triassic rocks—conventionally assumed to be around 240 million years old. According to secular age assignments, flowering plants were not supposed to have evolved until 100 million years later!1 These fossils force a shift in the ever-changing story of plant evolution. Most paleontologists believe flowering plants, or angiosperms, did not “evolve” until the Early Cretaceous system—supposedly 135 million years ago. They often refer to the Cretaceous...

More than three-fourths of the honey sold in U.S. grocery stores isn't exactly what the bees produce, according to testing done exclusively for Food Safety News. The results show that the pollen frequently has been filtered out of products labeled "honey." The removal of these microscopic particles from deep within a flower would make the nectar flunk the quality standards set by most of the world's food safety agencies.

Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2011 Cesium in pollen not viewed as health risk By KAZUAKI NAGATA Staff writer The Forestry Agency believes cedar pollen next spring contaminated by cesium fallout from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant will be well below the legal safety limit. The exposure from inhaling cesium-contaminated cedar pollen circulating from Fukushima Prefecture will have a maximum radiation reading of 0.000132 microsievert per hour, the agency said, based on a recent calculation of fallout affecting cedar needles and leaves. In June, the education and science ministry studied cedar leaves in the town of Kawamata, located about 45 km...

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20111022b3.html Saturday, Oct. 22, 2011 Fukushima cedar pollen to be tested Kyodo The Forestry Agency will test cedar pollen in Fukushima Prefecture for radiation from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, agency officials said Friday. If high radiation is detected, the test data might be incorporated into cedar pollen forecasts the Environment Ministry will announce later this year before the pollen starts raising allergy problems in early spring. The agency has requested funds to pay for the tests from the third supplementary budget for fiscal 2011 so they can be conducted as early as next month.

(NaturalNews) German government researchers have concluded that a bestselling Bayer pesticide is responsible for the recent massive die-off of honeybees across the country's Baden-Württemberg region. In response, the government has banned an entire family of pesticides, fueling accusations that pesticides may be responsible for the current worldwide epidemic of honeybee die-offs. Researchers found buildup of the pesticide clothianidin in the tissues of 99 percent of dead bees in Baden-Württemberg state. The German Research Center for Cultivated Plants concluded that nearly 97 percent of honeybee deaths had been caused directly by contact with the insecticide."It can unequivocally be concluded that a...

There's growing scientific evidence that global climate change is linked to the dramatic rise in allergies and asthma in the Western world. Studies have found that a higher level of carbon dioxide turbocharges the growth of plants whose pollen triggers allergies. In 2001 Lewis Ziska planted ragweed -- the main cause of hay fever in the fall -- at urban, suburban and rural sites near Baltimore. The plots had the same seeds and soil and were watered in the same way. Yet the downtown plants soon exploded in size, flowering earlier and producing five times the pollen of rural plants....

The Honey Bee Crisis of 2007 Escalating Honey Bee Decline Baffles Scientists Sally Morton Feb 17, 2007 The honey bee crisis in the United States has been escalating for several years, rising to "unprecedented" levels of honey bee losses between Oct 2006 and Feb 2007. The honey bee crisis of 2005, which was blamed on the Varoa mite, decimated as much as 50% of honey bee populations in the US, but was weathered, overcome, and quickly passed out of most people’s vocabulary. I wrote an article about it for Suite 101, which you can read here. In it, I gave...

Pollen Reveals Terracotta Army Origins Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Pollen Found Inside Jan. 29, 2007 — China’s Terracotta Army has mystified scholars since the 8,099 clay warriors and horses were first discovered in Emperor Qin Shihuang’s mausoleum in 1974. The figures, meant to protect the emperor in the afterlife, were buried with him around 210-209 B.C. At least one mystery about the imposing faux army recently was solved. It is now known that the horses and warriors were constructed in different locations, based on analysis of pollen found in fragments of terracotta that were collected from the clay figures.Horses Made...

Birds, bees, bats and other species that pollinate North American plant life are losing population, according to a study released Wednesday by the National Research Council. This "demonstrably downward" trend could damage dozens of commercially important crops, scientists warned, because three-fourths of all flowering plants depend on pollinators for fertilization. American honeybees, which pollinate more than 90 domestic commercial crops, have declined by 30 percent in the past 20 years. This poses a challenge to agricultural interests such as California almond farmers, who need about 1.4 million colonies of honeybees to pollinate 550,000 acres of their trees. By 2012, the...

Pollen Analysis May Solve Old Murder Mystery Wednesday, October 04, 2006 AP ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Three grains of pollen might help solve a 27-year-old murder mystery. To try to unmask the identity of a teenage girl found slain in a cornfield in western New York in 1979, investigators have turned to a pollen-analysis technique rarely used in the United States in hopes of pinpointing where she once lived. A forensic botanist in Texas determined that three microscopic pollen grains from an Australian pine that were recovered this summer inside the girl's red jacket and her pants pocket could have come...