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.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Christopher Hammell and his team have discovered that proteins MYRF-1 and LIN-42 act as the master developmental clock in C. elegans, scheduling the start time and duration of the worm’s four larval stages. This is the first non-repeating biological clock of its kind ever found.

AMHERST, Mass. — Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have designed non-toxic Salmonella bacteria to deliver viruses that are safe to humans but potent against liver and pancreatic cancer tumors — two cancers with an extremely poor prognosis. The researchers found that animal models treated with this combination of bacteria and viruses saw almost all their tumors eliminated and lived significantly longer.

Through a series of experiments on a replicated mini-beach, NYU researchers show how water waves can be used to move floating objects or hold them firmly in place—all without direct touch or contact.