• These days, I am tutoring a few first year Biology students. In search of how to do that in the best and most effective way, I found some helpful information here, and here.
• Most of us at some point learned about the effect of earthworms in soils and ecological processes. A recently accepted paper in Functional Ecology shows that this effect is largest in ecosystems that have no legacy of earthworm presence.
• Also recently accepted in Functional Ecology, a neat study on how urine from mammals in a Brazilian lowland rain forest affects microbial community composition and microbial function.
• After Kelly Ramirez and her colleagues’ paper on distribution of microbes in New York’s Central park, a group of Swiss and French researchers have now assessed the microbial communities in the street gutters of Paris. What’s next?
• You can find an interesting paper here, published by The Royal Society Open Science, on the role of science blogs.
• And for those who didn’t keep up with the news on gravitational waves, and the importance of this discovery, the BBC has a good news item on it.

Bjorn

Bjorn Robroek is the blog editor for Functional Ecologists.