Florida State University researchers are part of an international team whose work reveals that North and South American mammals interacted before the Panamanian land bridge formed about 3 million years ago.

Calcium isotopes in fossilized shells show ocean acidification caused the extinction event. Massive volcanic eruptions released CO2 into the atmosphere, acidifying seawater. Fifth Northwestern study to link volcanic eruptions to ocean acidification and extinction. Ancient events help scientists understand current CO2 increases and potential consequences.

Early modern humans, Homo sapiens, are known to have interbred with two older and now extinct human relatives, Neanderthals and Denisovans. UC Berkeley researchers now report evidence in the human genome for two even earlier interbreedings, one with a ghost ancestor before about 50,000 years ago in Africa and another that brought DNA into the human genome through Denisovans, which had bred with this super-archaic ancestor in Eurasia.

The fate of a stressed plant—whether it thrives despite the stress, merely copes with it, or succumbs—is heavily influenced by its genetic makeup and the coordinated expression of key stress response regulators that mediate that shift into survival mode. In work newly published in The Plant Cell, researchers from the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) integrated visible stress responses with changes in gene expression, metabolism, and physiology to identify a conserved mechanism of stress signaling in plants.

Researchers at Kennedy Krieger Institute and Penn Engineering announcing the development of an advanced artificial intelligence system that measures a child’s ability to imitate simple body movements using ordinary video recordings. The Computerized Assessment of Motor Imitation, or CAMI-2DNet, brings researchers one step closer to a scalable, objective method for evaluating imitation which is an important behavioral marker associated with autism.