Artificial intelligence is now better than humans at identifying many patterns, but evolutionary relationships have always been difficult for it. A team from the Bioinformatics Department at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, working under Professor Axel Mosig has trained a neuronal network to tackle this issue. The AI can relate any data from different species in an evolutionary relationship and identify which characteristics have developed in what manner throughout the course of evolution. “Our approach lets artificial intelligence look at data through the lense of evolution, in a way,” explains Vivian Brandenburg, lead author of the report published in Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal on August 22, 2025.

A University of Cambridge study of adult mammary gland development has revealed new genes involved in breastfeeding, and provided insights into how genetic changes may be associated with breastfeeding disorders and postpartum breast cancers.

For the first time, researchers report that Arctic algae can hustle along in -15 C – the lowest-temperature movement ever recorded in complex, living cells. This discovery raises new questions about how algal communities regulate the overall health of the Arctic environment.

Researchers led by Noah Cowan at Johns Hopkins University have secured NIH funding to probe how animals alternate between "explore" (sensing) and "exploit" (task-oriented) behaviors in uncertain environments, using the weakly electric glass knifefish as  a model. The team includes researchers from four universities who will integrate their expertise in neuroscience, math, engineering, and machine learning to build on 2023 findings in  Nature Machine Intelligence that revealed the explore/exploit pattern across species from amoebas to humans. The project aims to decode decision triggers, with implications for robotics and medicine.

Researchers have described a large set of previously unrecognised enzymatic domains – named the Lipocone superfamily – and outlined their evolutionary pathway from bacterial defence molecules to key players in human development.

Researchers at the Salk Institute, UC San Diego, and Washington University have gathered novel details on undernourished children’s gut microbe populations in the largest study of its kind to-date, identifying dozens of new microbes to form an unprecedented database. They found that gut microbiome diversity and genome stability may be a powerful marker for whether children thrive or suffer. Their findings pave the way for diagnostic and preventative solutions for undernourished children around the globe, while also opening the opportunity for innovations across other public health crises from obesity to malaria to COVID-19.