CardioNVT is an end-to-end deep learning platform for rapid, immunostaining-free assessment of cardiomyocyte nuclear ploidy in situ. Using only DAPI-stained heart sections, it segments cardiomyocyte nuclei, tracks them across z-stack planes, reconstructs 3D nuclear volumes, and infers ploidy from volume measurements, enabling scalable studies of cardiac development, remodeling, and repair.

In a Nature Medicine paper, Pitt researchers report that a novel spinal cord stimulation approach can accelerate stroke recovery, improving arm strength and movement with minimal physical therapy.

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.

Minute warty birch caterpillars ardently defend their leaf tip homes from invading caterpillars, but how do they defend against lethal ladybeetle attacks? Jayne Yack reports in Journal of Experimental Biology that the tiny day-old caterpillars are able to distinguish between the footsteps of approaching adult ladybeetles and shuffling caterpillar attackers, allowing the defending caterpillar to evade deadly ladybeetle attacks by first falling silent and then by hurling themselves from the leaf on a silken safety thread.

Found in the Amazon, Pantanal, and Atlantic Forest, they were distinguished from what was previously known as a single species by integrating morphological analyses, molecular data, and interactions with host plants.

Threatened plant species could be conserved by planting them "inter situ" - in wild environments outside their current geographic range - per Amazon rainforest case study

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.