The Molecular Community Network (MCN) can identify metabolomics’ “dark matter”, the unknown molecules that can help researchers find new markers for disease, and measure the efficiency of medical treatment.

Orangutans have individual learning styles: over their 8.5-year development, infant orangutans differ from one another in how frequently they engage in social and individual learning. Learning style predicts skill development: infants’ social and individual learning tendencies during development predict how many food items they will have learned by the time they become independent from their mothers. Learning is more than simply “social” or “individual”: the study shows for the first time that social and individual forms of learning interact to shape broad skill acquisition in wild great apes.

Dog brains segment speech into words in a way previously seen only in humans, a new study from Hungary finds. This suggests that efficient speech processing is not necessarily a consequence of humans’ unique language abilities: regular exposure to speech alone can reshape how the brain functions, even in a mammalian species evolutionarily distant from humans. The discovery by the Neuroethology of Communication Lab at the ELTE Department of Ethology, Budapest was published in Science.

Thousands of rapidly evolving aphid proteins initially resisted both conventional sequence comparisons and AlphaFold2. By sequencing closely related aphid species and supplying the missing evolutionary context, researchers uncovered a shared structural blueprint across approximately 2,400 proteins and established a method that may help scientists study other fast-evolving proteins involved in immunity, host-parasite interactions, and agriculture.