New research published in Nature Sustainability and led by Notre Dame has explored how rice-fish coculturing — an intervention technique that introduces fish into the rice fields — could help reduce disease incidence and poverty along the northern Senegal River basin, a hot spot for schistosomiasis.

This study debunks a decades-old myth that tropical mountain flowers evolved to attract hummingbirds because high altitudes are too cold and wet for bees and finds that hummingbirds are simply much better at moving pollen. This is because hummingbirds just drink the nectar, while bees constantly groom themselves to save pollen as food for offspring—leaving less of it for the next flower. Over generations, flowers will change shapes, colors, and scents to favor hummingbirds over bees. These tiny adaptations can result in entirely new plant species without requiring any major climate or environmental changes.

UC San Diego engineers have created a tiny optical device that pairs with AI to spot and correct distorted light from a single image, a breakthrough that could sharpen imaging in fields from biology to manufacturing.

Arctic communities are increasingly exposed to dangerous weather events due to climate change and rely on accurate weather forecasts. However, conditions in the lower atmosphere remain poorly observed in the Arctic because monitoring systems are expensive and difficult to deploy. Now, researchers propose a new framework for on-demand atmospheric observations based on lightweight, low-cost profiling systems that can be operated by local communities whenever additional weather data are needed, helping improve forecasting and climate resilience.

Antipredator training can make animals born in captivity regain their fear of enemies, necessary to prepare them for release into the wild. But now, researchers in the US have found that an alternative method may be more efficient: training pregnant females instead, relying on maternal effects to transmit the learned fear to their offspring. They showed that daughters of the endangered Pacific pocket mouse showed more vigilance behaviors around live snakes if their mothers had undergone antipredator conditioning that taught them to associate these with an aversive but harmless stimulus. However, no such effect was found for male offspring. The mechanisms by which this maternal effect is passed on are still unclear, but could involve prenatal programming through stress hormones, or maternal postnatal care.

"Instead of studying all 8,000 kinds of neurons, we can instead understand how circuits work by studying these 200 modular elements that are wired together in various ways for different functions."

In hopes of preventing home-exercise injuries and extending the expert guidance of coaches, researchers from Drexel University and Michigan State University have developed a prototype of a program that uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to analyze video and provide form coaching in real time.

A newly discovered fossil site in Egypt is reshaping scientists’ understanding of how marine ecosystems recovered after the asteroid impact that ended the Age of Dinosaurs. In a study published in Science Advances, researchers report that compositionally modern marine fish communities were already established just 4 million years after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.

The site, known as Qreiya 3 and dated to 62.2 million years ago, preserves an exceptionally diverse offshore marine ecosystem from the early Paleocene. Hundreds of fossil fishes recovered from the site include more than 20 groups of ray-finned fishes, making it the richest and most diverse Danian fish assemblage yet discovered.

The fossils reveal that many fish groups common in today’s oceans—including early relatives of tunas, mackerels, jacks, moonfishes, and pipefishes—had already diversified shortly after the extinction event that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs. At the same time, several predatory fish groups dominant in Cretaceous seas are notably absent, suggesting a rapid ecological turnover in marine ecosystems.

Led by researchers from the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center in collaboration with the University of Michigan and KU Leuven, the study provides some of the clearest fossil evidence yet that modern-style marine fish faunas emerged remarkably quickly after one of Earth’s greatest mass extinctions.