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We know relatively little about how vegan diets and non-vegan diets compare when it comes to the gut microbiome. Gollamudi and Gollamudi tackle this challenge by investigating how changes in a participant's diet affected the diversity of their intestinal microbiome.

In this article the authors looked at arginine synthesis across different bacteria commonly found in different regional diets. They found that B. megaterium and C. sporogenes both caused a higher pH to occur on their agar plates compared to other bacteria tested indicating a greater amount of arginine synthesis.

The authors compare nutritional content of foods found in Western versus Asian grocery stores to determine whether one cultural diet is healthier than the other.

Aquaponics (the combination of aquatic plant farming with fish production) is an innovative farming practice, but the fish that are typically used, like tilapia, are expensive and space-consuming to cultivate. Medina and Alvarez explore other options test if mosquitofish are a viable option in the aquaponic cultivation of herbs and microgreens.

The authors investigate whether Western Bluebirds and other perching birds consume eggshells, as a source of calcium, at a greater rate before reproduction and during nest building when they are unable to store calcium.

The mountain chain of the Western Ghats on the Indian peninsula, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is home to about 200 frog species, 89 of which are endemic. Distinctive to each frog species, their vocalizations can be used for species recognition. Manually surveying frogs at night during the rain in elephant and big cat forests is difficult, so being able to autonomously record ambient soundscapes and identify species is essential. An effective machine learning (ML) species classifier requires substantial training data from this area. The goal of this study was to assess data augmentation techniques on a dataset of frog vocalizations from this region, which has a minimal number of audio recordings per species. Consequently, enhancing an ML model’s performance with limited data is necessary. We analyzed the effects of four data augmentation techniques (Time Shifting, Noise Injection, Spectral Augmentation, and Test-Time Augmentation) individually and their combined effect on the frog vocalization data and the public environmental sounds dataset (ESC-50). The effect of combined data augmentation techniques improved the model's relative accuracy as the size of the dataset decreased. The combination of all four techniques improved the ML model’s classification accuracy on the frog calls dataset by 94%. This study established a data augmentation approach to maximize the classification accuracy with sparse data of frog call recordings, thereby creating a possibility to build a real-world automated field frog species identifier system. Such a system can significantly help in the conservation of frog species in this vital biodiversity hotspot.

Stem cells are at the forefront of research in regenerative medicine and cell therapy. Two essential properties of stem cells are self-renewal and potency, having the ability to specialize into different types of cells. Here, Park and Jeong took advantage of previously identified stem cell transcription factors associated with potency to differentiate umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells (US-MSCs) from morphologically similar fibroblasts. Western blot analysis of the transcription factors Klf4, Nanog, and Sox2 revealed their expression was unique to US-MSCs providing insight for future methods of differentiating between these cell lines.

Although the United States maintains millions of square kilometers of nature reserves to protect the biodiversity of the specimens living there, little is known about how confining these species within designated protected lands influences the genetic variation required for a healthy population. In this study, the authors sequenced genetic barcodes of insects from a recently established nature reserve, the Southwestern Riverside County Multi-Species Reserve (SWRCMSR), and a non-protected area, the Mt. San Jacinto College (MSJC) Menifee campus, to compare the genetic variation between the two populations. Their results demonstrated that the midge fly population from the SWRCMSR had fewer unique DNA barcode sequence changes than the MSJC population, indicating that the comparatively younger nature reserve's population had likely not yet established its own unique genetic drift changes.

Here, seeking to identify an optimal method to classify tree species through remote sensing, the authors used a few machine learning algorithms to classify forest tree species through multispectral satellite imagery. They found the Random Forest algorithm to most accurately classify tree species, with the potential to improve model training and inference based on the inclusion of other tree properties.

The authors looked at the ability of eggshells to slow ice melting. They found that eggshells were able to increase ice melting time when crushed showing that they were an effective thermal barrier.