Great hammerhead sharks are slow to grow and slow to reproduce, which makes them very vulnerable to overfishing — worldwide populations have shrunk and genetic diversity is dangerously low. To conserve these sharks, identifying the habitats they use and when they use them is critical. Scientists tagging and tracking sharks near Andros Island in the Bahamas have now discovered that although some sharks travel to the east coast of the US, others prefer to stick closer to home, living in the warm waters around Andros and returning to the same sites year after year. 

Researchers have engineered yeast to efficiently convert methanol into D-lactic acid, a key compound for biodegradable plastics and pharmaceuticals. By optimizing gene and promoter combinations, they achieved the highest reported yield to date, offering a sustainable alternative to petroleum-based production. Their findings advance eco-friendly chemical manufacturing.

A new study has discovered that birds in the Galápagos Islands are changing their behaviour due to traffic noise, with those frequently exposed to vehicles showing heightened levels of aggression.

During trials involving traffic noise, Galápagos yellow warblers (Setophaga petechia aureola) increased the duration of their songs, increased the minimum frequencies of their songs (to reduce overlap with the traffic noise), and birds living close to roads displayed increased physical aggression.

The research is published in the journal Animal Behaviour and is led by experts from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) in Cambridge, England, and the Konrad Lorenz Research Centre at the University of Vienna.

Beth Beason-Abmayr, a respected educator and champion of innovative teaching, has been awarded the Arthur C. Guyton Distinguished Educator Award by the American Physiological Society. The national honor recognizes outstanding contributions to physiology education and will be presented at the American Physiology Summit in Baltimore this spring.

Inhibiting the sonic hedgehog (Shh) pathway strongly perturbs feather development in chickens by restricting feather bud outgrowth, invagination and branching, according to a study published March 20^th, in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Rory Cooper and Michel Milinkovitch from the University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Feathers, essential for thermoregulation, flight, and communication in birds, originate from simple appendages known as proto-feathers, which were present in certain dinosaurs.By studying embryonic development of the chicken, two researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have uncovered a key role of a molecular signalling pathway (the Shh pathway) in their formation. This research, published in the journal PLOS Biology, provides new insights into the morphogenetic mechanisms that led to feather diversification throughout evolution.