The night sky teems with migrating songbirds, aloft in their millions following routes etched in evolutionary time.

The U.S.

Food drying is a common process for preserving many types of food, including fruits and meat; however, drying can alter the food’s quality and nutritional value. In recent years, researchers have developed precision techniques that use optical sensors and AI to facilitate more efficient drying.

Devin Edmonds isn’t like most amphibian hobbyists. For one thing, he’s now a trained herpetologist, studying frogs and turtles as a doctoral student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

You’ve probably heard of product recalls involving lettuce, spinach, or other leafy greens. Consuming these popular vegetables is among the main causes of food poisoning, affecting thousands of people every year. Leafy greens can become contaminated with pathogenic E. coli or other bacteria through splashes of soil or contaminated irrigation water in the field, or through processing and handling.

In the upper reaches of a Minnesota watershed, the water is so full of dissolved nitrous oxide that University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign hydrologist Zhongjie Yu

If you’re a crayfish, location is everything. Here in North America, times are tough for the mini crustaceans. Habitat destruction, damming, and pollution have decimated local populations, such that many species are in dire need of help. But when some of the same species were exported to Europe, they found a much more favorable environment and are thriving. A little too much — American expats bully European crayfish and spread disease, driving many local species to the brink.

Fungal contamination of cereal grains poses a substantial threat to food security and public health while causing hundreds of millions of dollars in economic losses annually.

A few years back, a group of weed scientists showed that soil-applied herbicides are less effective against agricultural weeds in the context of our changing climate.

Microbes might be invisible, but their teeming masses influence everything from agriculture to the environment to the food we eat. That’s why experience working with microbes has become a must for countless industries.