When bacteria are under antibiotic attack, it is not ‘every man for himself.’ Researchers have discovered that bacterial populations work as a team to survive antibiotics. The study reveals that bacteria pool their resources, helping quiescent or dormant cells survive. The findings help explain why some bacteria are hard to eliminate and suggest potential future approaches to improve antibiotic effectiveness.

While reproductive evolution of flowering plants (angiosperms) is traditionally linked to the end-Cretaceous biotic crisis, new research suggests angiosperm dispersal ecologies had already diversified by that time. The study is based on an analysis of flowering plant diaspores – the units comprising seeds and associated structures – from a Late Cretaceous fossil forest site in New Mexico. Flowering plants possess remarkable diversity in fruit and seed size and shape, reflecting morphology for dispersal by wind, water, and animals. This diversity is thought to have only originated during the Paleogene, despite an earlier increase in abundance and diversification of angiosperms across the Cretaceous. Here Jaemin Lee et al. suggest an earlier origin of variation in angiosperms seeds and fruits. They describe a relatively well-preserved collection of 77 diaspore morphotypes from a Late Cretaceous fossil forest in New Mexico, USA, featuring fleshy fruits and an average weight approximately the size of a blueberry. Though likely dispersed by vertebrates, their emergence may have been part of the shift to shady, humid tropical forests, rather than driven by vertebrate diversification. The results broaden “our understanding of forest ecology and plant-animal interactions during the first half of angiosperm evolutionary history,” say the authors.

Migratory birds fly precise seasonal paths to their breeding and non-breeding grounds, even when those grounds are separated by thousands of miles. But how do the birds know the difference between these two areas – is this information innate, or is it learned as hatchlings? The answers may affect how or if these birds can adapt to potential shifts in these grounds caused by global climate change. To learn more about what determines the non-breeding ranges of the pied flycatcher, Koosje Lamers and colleagues performed an egg shuffle, moving eggs from nests in the Netherlands to Sweden in a five-year experiment. The resulting “common garden” of fully genetic Dutch birds hatched in Dutch nests, genetically Dutch but Swedish-hatched birds, and fully genetic and hatched Swedish birds offered a way to track differences in migratory journeys. The researchers found that both inheritance and the hatching environment determined non-breeding areas, with the “half Dutch” birds traveling to non-breeding areas that were intermediate in location between the fully Swedish and Dutch populations.

A new Cornell University study helps deepen the understanding of skull shapes within different sized dogs and draws a link between cranial and facial shapes, body weight and the risk of syringomyelia, a spinal condition common in some dog breeds.