University of Florida News

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Chew on this: Just because you haven’t seen termite swarms in or around your house, doesn’t mean they’re not busily devouring it.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Keeping in step with the U.S. economy, Florida land values took a major tumble in 2008, with some areas losing more than half of their 2007 worth.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Three women hop into their truck to begin their workday, and almost immediately begin dishing the dirt.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The Chinese brake fern accumulates huge quantities of arsenic, but one of its genes caused a model plant to do just the opposite, a discovery that surprised University of Florida scientists and could lead to low-arsenic rice varieties.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Nematodes may be the most abundant creatures on Earth, but analyzing communities of the wormlike animals is difficult because they’re microscopic and many species look alike.

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GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The recession may be responsible for a slump of a different sort: an unexpected dive in shark attacks, says a University of Florida researcher.
Shark attacks worldwide in 2008 dipped to their lowest level in five years, a sign that Americans may be forgoing vacation trips to the beach, said George Burgess, ichthyologist [...]

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A new University of Florida study based on DNA analysis from living flowering plants shows that the ancestors of most modern trees diversified extremely rapidly 90 million years ago, ultimately leading to the formation of forests that supported similar evolutionary bursts in animals and other plants.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The largest snake the world has ever known — as long as a school bus and as heavy as a small car — ruled tropical ecosystems only 6 million years after the demise of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex, according to a new discovery published in the journal Nature.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Florida’s avocado industry, the nation’s second-largest, could lose millions of dollars if a new disease reaches the state’s southern tip, according to University of Florida experts.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — While hitting its 30th anniversary mark this year, Florida’s Master Gardener program has another reason to party: Its volunteers recently reached a milestone, logging more than 5 million hours since the program began.