Dinosaurs are famous for being big, from the towering Tyrannosaurus rex to the colossal Apatosaurus. But a new study suggests that one of the greatest mysteries of dinosaur evolution isn’t how some species became giants—it’s why even the smallest dinosaurs never became truly tiny.

Pollinators are important to humans and nature due to their role in ecosystem functioning and services. Research on the effects of pollinator management in protected areas is insufficient compared with that on farmlands and urban areas, potentially hindering appropriate policy implementation. To fill this gap, a new study investigated the impacts of pollinator-friendly management practices compared to conventional management in European protected areas.

This research was led by the HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research in collaboration with 30 European institutes. Published in Conservation Biology, the synthesis examines whether pollinator-friendly management in protected areas has positive effects on vegetation, floral resources, and a broad range of pollinator groups. The findings show that pollinator-friendly management had mostly neutral and only a few positive effects on plants and pollinators.

Caloric restriction (CR) is an effective dietary intervention that delays aging and improves metabolic health. Previous studies have reported that lithocholic acid (LCA), a secondary bile acid, increases significantly in serum during CR. LCA has been shown to mimic the anti-aging effects of CR across multiple model organisms, including elevating muscle NAD⁺ levels, enhancing grip strength and exercise endurance in aged mice, and extending lifespan in nematodes and fruit flies.

A new defect-chemistry-informed phase-field model helps explain how charged defects at grain boundaries guide grain growth in oxide ceramics. Applied to Fe-doped SrTiO₃, the model shows that solute drag alone can produce skewed grain-size distributions and highly varied grain-boundary potentials, offering a route for microstructure design.