Shoots of hope for Britain's cherished ash trees
Ash trees are fighting back against a disease that has ravaged the British countryside, new scientific evidence shows.When ash dieback arrived in 2012, predictions suggested up to 85% of ash trees could be lost.But now scientists have discovered that ash woodlands are naturally evolving greater resistance to the infection.The discovery offers renewed hope that the much-loved trees will survive in the British landscape.
"It is hope born out of the death of a lot of trees," said Prof Richard Buggs of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, and Queen Mary University of London.But he said other interventions would be needed to give ash trees a helping hand, such as protecting trees from grazing deer and breeding the most resilient trees for future planting schemes."We have fresh motivation to look after our ash populations, to protect them from other problems like deer browsing, and to let nature take its course and evolve trees with more resistance," he told BBC News.The Ash dieback fungus originated in Asia and was introduced to Europe about 30 years ago.The study of ash trees at a woodland in Surrey revealed subtle shifts over time in different genes, which should help new saplings fight back against it.The trees are evolving greater resistance to the disease than their predecessors - an example of Charles Darwin's natural selection theory in action.Richard Nichols, professor of evolutionary genetics at Queen Mary University of London, said a "tragedy for the trees has been a revelation for scientists: allowing us to show that thousands of genes are contributing to the ash trees' fightback against the fungus".
Ash dieback demonstrates how devastating introduced pathogens can be for our trees and the species which rely upon them, said Rebecca Gosling of the Woodland Trust. "The findings highlight how vital it is to support natural regeneration in woodlands, furthering our understanding of how to best manage our ash woodlands," she said.Scientists had feared the ash would go the way of the elm, which has been almost wiped out by Dutch elm disease.The loss of the native tree would have a devastating effect on biodiversity as well as changing the face of the landscape.
Since its arrival in Britain in 2012, ash dieback has spread to every corner of the British Isles, causing widespread damage to woodlands.Ash fungus genetic code unravelledAlarm call as world's trees slide towards extinctionAsh tree set for extinction in EuropeSigns of the disease can be seen through withered and blighted leaves.In many cases the fungal disease will eventually kill the tree.The research is published in the journal, Science.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
The unique human body part that evolution cannot explain
The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our history. But scientists are still puzzling over why we evolved into this particular form. Why do humans uniquely have a chin, for example? And why, relative to body weight, is a human testicle triple the size of a gorilla's but a fifth of that of a chimpanzee? As I show in my new book, The Tree of Life, we are still searching for the answers to many of these 'why' questions. But we are starting to find answers to some of them. The story of evolution tells us how, starting from simple beginnings, each species was built, when each of the components that make a living creature was added to its blueprint. If we climb the evolutionary tree of life, we can follow a twisting path that visits the increasingly specialised branches that a species belongs to. We humans, for example, were animals before we became vertebrates; mammals before evolving into primates and so on. The groups of species we share each of these branches with reveal the order our body parts appeared. A body and a gut (inventions of the animal branch) must have come before backbone and limbs (vertebrate branch); milk and hair (mammals) came before fingernails (primates). There is a way we can study the separate problem of just why we evolved each of these body parts, but it only works if the feature in question has evolved more than once on separate branches of the tree of life. This repeated evolution is called convergence. It can be a source of frustration for biologists because it confuses us as to how species are related. Swallows and swifts, for example, were once classified as sister species. We now know from both DNA and comparisons of their skeletons that swallows are really closer relatives of owls than swifts. Size matters when it comes to evolution But convergent evolution becomes something useful when we think of it as a kind of natural experiment. The size of primate testicles gives us a classic example. Abyssinian black and white colobus monkey and bonnet macaque adult males are roughly the same size. But, like chimps, humans and gorillas, these similar monkeys have vastly dissimilar testicles. Colobus testicles weigh just 3 grams. The testicles of the macaques, in contrast, are a whopping 48 grams. You could come up with several believable explanations for their different testicle sizes. Large testicles might be the equivalent of the peacock's tail, not useful per se but attractive to females. But perhaps the most plausible explanation relates to the way they mate. A male colobus monkey competes ferociously for access to a harem of females who will mate exclusively with him. Macaques, on the other hand, live in peaceful mixed troops of about 30 monkeys and have a different approach to love where everyone mates with everyone else: males with multiple females (polygamy) and females with multiple males (polyandry). The colobus with his harem can get away with producing a bare minimum of sperm – if a droplet is enough to produce a baby, then why make more? For a male macaque, the competition to reproduce happens in a battle between his sperm and the sperm of other males who mated before or after. A male macaque with large testicles should make more sperm, giving him a higher chance of passing on his genes. It's a sensible explanation for their different testicle sizes, but is it true? This is where convergent evolution helps. If we look across the whole of the mammal branch of the tree of life, we find there are many groups of mammals that have evolved testicles of all different sizes. In almost all these separate cases, larger testicles are consistently found in promiscuous species and smaller in monogamous. A small-testicled, silverback male gorilla has sole access to a harem. Big-testicled chimps and bonobos are indeed highly promiscuous. Dolphins, meanwhile, may have the biggest mammalian testicles of all, making up as much as 4 per cent of their body weight (equivalent to human testicles weighing roughly 3 kilos). Although wild dolphin sex lives are naturally hard to study, spinner dolphins at least fit our expectations, engaging in mass mating events called wuzzles. It was thanks to the multiple observations provided by convergent evolution that we were able to discover this consistent correlation between testicle size and sex life right across the mammals. And as for humans, we have testicle size somewhere in the middle, you can make of this what you want! But what of the human chin? The human chin has been fertile ground for arguments between scientists over its purpose. As with testicles, there are half a dozen plausible ideas to explain the evolution of the human chin. It could have evolved to strengthen the jaw of a battling caveman. Maybe the chin evolved to exaggerate the magnificence of a manly beard. It might even be a by-product of the invention of cooking and the softer food it produced – a functionless facial promontory left behind by the receding tide of a weakening jaw. Intriguingly, however, a chin can be found in no other mammal, not even our closest cousins, the Neanderthals. Thanks to the uniqueness of the homo sapiens chin, while we have a rich set of possible explanations for its evolutionary purpose, in the absence of convergent evolution, we have no sensible way of testing them. Some parts of human nature may be destined to remain a mystery.
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
Beastly Britain by Karen R Jones review – how animals shaped British identity
When newts go a-wooing, sometime in the spring, their signature move is the handstand. Girl newts cluster round to watch, while the boy newts flip on to their creepily human hands and shake their tails in the air. The waggiest newt is the winner, although the actual act of love is a strictly no-contact sport. The male deposits a packet of sperm on an underwater leaf for the female to collect and insert into her own reproductive tract. The whole business is best thought of, says Karen R Jones, as a 'sexually charged game of pass-the-parcel'. This kind of anthropomorphising often strikes naturalists as unscientific or even downright distasteful. But Jones is an environmental historian and her methodology allows, indeed impels, her to start from the principle that Britain's human and animal populations are culturally entwined. Consequently, we cannot 'see' a fox, hedgehog or newt without bringing to it a rich stew of presumptions and fantasy, drawn from childhood picturebooks, out-of-date encyclopedias and, in my case, the 1970s TV classic Tales of the Riverbank, in which small critters say funny things in the West Country burr of . This pre-knowing can have a radical impact on the chances of a particular species flourishing or going under. Take hedgehogs, which, Jones tells us in this beautifully written book, have been in Britain for the last 15m years. They witnessed the extinction of the woolly mammoth and saw the first humans arrive in Europe. It was at this point that they started to pick up a reputation for general malevolence. Bandit-like, hedgehogs were reputed to sneak into human settlements at night and steal poultry eggs (true) and suck the udders of sleeping cows (almost certainly false). Their ability to munch on toxic toads without getting sick (true) and willingness to ferry any witch who had lost her broomstick (surely very uncomfortable) confirmed that hedgehogs had gone over to the dark side. No wonder that killing them counted as a public service: the records of one Cheshire village show 8,585 hedgehogs destroyed over a 35-year period in the late 1600s. How different from today, when the hedgehog routinely tops those 'Britain's favourite animal' polls. Now we build shelters for them in our gardens and worry about how they will fare when crossing the road. This radical shift of opinion, says Jones, can be traced back to one hugely popular book, Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is an industrious washerwoman who keeps her neighbours, including Peter Rabbit and his signature blue coat, spick and span. The influence of Potter's 1905 classic has been so enduring that, when a charity was set up in 1983 to care for injured hedgehogs, it was obvious what its name should be. These days, Tiggywinkles is the largest wildlife hospital in the world. Beastly Britain is full of stories like this, which take an everyday animal – newt, hedgehog, pigeon, sheep, flea – and map out both its physical life (a matter of burrows, breeding cycles and flight paths) as well as its cultural traces, which concern legend, loathing and desire. Often these two kinds of knowing collide in startling ways. Take sheep, which are mostly seen as 'white noise in the countryside', bland and bleating and only good for counting yourself to sleep. In fact, Jones reveals, they are crackingly clever, able to recognise the faces of up to 50 of their sheep-friends, not to mention their human guardians. The revelations keep on coming. For instance, that we are still living among dinosaurs. The next time a pigeon swoops down to steal a chip, take a close look at its scaly, reptilian feet. They are the legacy of the Archaeopteryx, a winged dinosaur the size of a raven, with a bony tail, flight feathers and an ability to glide over short distances. Less persuasive, though even more intriguing, is the possibility that a pod of plesiosaurs still bobs off the Devon and Cornwall coast. How else to account for the string of sightings of a giant grey sea snake, with a long neck, snakey head and vicious tusks? The rational part of us knows that this sea monster is likely to be a basking shark or a giant piece of flotsam. Our dreaming part longs for it to be a remnant from ancient times, what Jones calls a 'proximate peculiar', that refuses to quite come into view. Beastly Britain by Karen R Jones is published by Yale (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Telegraph
6 hours ago
- Telegraph
Beware of AI energy hyperbole: scientists already have a solution
Scientists from three British universities are together developing an atom-thick graphene chip that slashes energy use for computing and AI data centres by over 90pc, radically changing the trajectory of global electricity demand over the next quarter century. It promises a future where semiconductors are so energy efficient that we will have to recharge our mobile phones just once a week. A good laptop battery will run for 80 hours. 'We're very confident that we will be able to cut electricity use for computing by 90pc and perhaps even by five times more than that,' said Sir Colin Humphreys, the project leader and professor of materials science at Queen Mary University of London. 'We expect to have a prototype that works by 2029, and we should be manufacturing millions of working devices by 2032-2033,' he said. Queen Mary has teamed up with the University of Nottingham and the James Watt Nanofabrication Centre at the University of Glasgow, putting together the most advanced collective knowledge on 2D graphene semiconductors on the planet. They are backed by grants from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. 'It is very much a global race but we have the world lead in graphene. The Chinese are pouring huge sums into this and have been trying to reproduce our technology but can't yet do it,' said Prof Humphreys. 'They asked me to come to China and more or less said 'name your price'. I declined the offer. The technology has huge military implications,' he said. If graphene can deliver this quantum jump before the end of the decade, and start rolling it out at scale in the early 2030s, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and the giant hyper-scalers will not need extra fleets of nuclear reactors and gas plants to run their AI data centres. Shell, BP and the European drilling majors may come to regret their Faustian pivot back to natural gas, a strategy that is in essence one giant bet on AI energy hyperbole. Russia is the latest country to jump on the data centre bandwagon, eyeing a resurrection play for Gazprom after the loss of 140bn cubic meters of annual pipeline sales to Europe. Alexei Chekunkov, the minister for the Russian Far East, told the St Petersburg economic forum this week that power-hungry computers could save the industry. 'All this gas is lying unused underground. The question of what to do with it is very urgent, so let's think about it for AI and blockchain generation,' he said. It was the same talk this spring at the CeraWeek energy conference in Houston, Texas, where it was an article of faith that AI and language learning models will require a vast expansion of fossil-fired power for decades to come, mostly from gas but also from coal if Donald Trump gets his way. Trump has signed an executive order to ' turbocharge coal mining ', proclaiming that America will need to double electricity output to drive America's AI supremacy. 'We're ending Joe Biden's war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all. All those plants that have been closed are going to be opened,' he said. We may avert this dystopian disaster after all. The magic lies in the unique properties of graphene, a flat sheet of carbon atoms first isolated in a Nobel prize discovery in Manchester in 2004. 'Graphene conduction electrons don't go through the material like copper and silicon: they glide along the surface like an ice-skater. That is why it is the best conductor in the world,' said Prof Humphreys. More chips can be packed into a data processing hub, and stacked in layers, without voracious needs for water cooling. 'They are diverting whole rivers in the US to build data centres,' he said. Google alone used 6bn gallons of water last year to cool its operations. ChatGPT uses half a litre for every 100-word request, and much of this is happening in areas under water-stress. You can grow graphene by using methane as the raw material. It is plentiful, harmless, and can be entirely home-made. 'There is no dependence on other countries for supplies,' he said. The technical problem with graphene is that it has no 'band gap', which is what enables semiconductors to switch on and off rapidly. The project has found a way to overcome this by adding layers of indium selenide. This is the secret source. The research arms of the US army and navy are backing a rival 2D technology at Penn State University using molybdenum disulfide to build a computer. The project published its findings two weeks ago in Nature, which also point to dramatic savings in energy use. Whoever gets there first, the 80-year age of silicon is over, and so is the old model of TSMC, Intel and the incumbent semiconductor industry. Trying to miniaturise chips down to the frontier of three or two nanometers (nm) is the last expensive gasp of a technology that will be obsolete in a few years. 'This is going to put silicon out of business. We have reached its atomic limits. At the end of the day, it is inefficient and won't be able to compete,' said Prof Humphreys. I wrote recently about an entirely different approach to AI data centres by the global nanotechnology institute IMEC, which uses superconductors to slash energy use by orders of magnitude. It involves soaking standard 28nm chips in liquid helium at minus 269C and keeping them cold by cryogenic cooling. This lets you stack chips a hundred layers high for the extreme demands of AI without causing the copper wires to overheat. In the meantime we face an energy crunch until we get over the hump. AI computing demands are doubling every six months. Typical data centres consumed eight kW per rack three years ago. Nvidia's latest GB200 chip needs 120 kW per rack for training ChatGPT. Data centres are already consuming 20pc of Ireland's electricity. National Grid expects commercial power demand for British data centres to rise sixfold over the next decade, most of it concentrated around London where it is hardest to deliver extra power. But wild talk that computing will gobble up half the world's electricity by 2040 is crude extrapolation and likely to prove another Malthusian scare, much like the alarmism four years ago over lithium and critical minerals – before the bubble popped and prices collapsed by 80pc. There is a problem for some rare earths and strategic minerals but not because they are scarce: it is because the West fell asleep while China locked up the processing industry and the immediate supply chain to gain political leverage. That can and will be fixed. By the same token, the energy needs of advanced computing will also be fixed, and without requiring a mad dash for coal and gas. Technologists will once again save us from our own incorrigible stupidity.
