A University of Washington-led team used motion cameras to gauge how often nectar robbing occurs. The results, published Aug. 6 in Ecology and Evolution, reveal both nectar robbing and pollination visits, showcasing a broader pattern that the team previously identified by comparing bird bill length to flower length.

An international team led by Canadian researchers has solved why snake embryos form a curious spiral. This ability to coil in the embryo is why snakes are able to hatch with the longest body of all vertebrate animals. The study, published today in the journal Current Biology, reports that snake embryos coil into a right-handed spiral as their long body grows while being tethered by the gut. The team observed that for the first few weeks of the eggs being laid, snake embryos seem only to coil dextrally, or right-handed, from head to tail. To grow a long body, snake embryos accelerate the body growth, but the gut cannot catch up with it, so they detach the slow-growing gut, which is now tethering the lengthening body. The body buckles and twists into coiling. The study is based on examination of photos of snake embryos in the literature and in databases of museum collections. More an 900 embryos from 39 snake and other limbless squamate species were assessed.

Communication between cells in plants, animals and humans takes place via specialised connecting structures. An international team led by biologists from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) and involving the University of Tübingen has now discovered how the regulation of very similar structures was already present in multicellular bacteria, implying that this must have originated much earlier in the course of evolution. In the scientific journal published by the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), they describe that the exchange of calcium plays a central role in bacteria, just as it does in humans.

A tiny processing step has far-reaching consequences for mitochondrial function: The removal of a single amino acid determines whether new proteins can assemble into stable complexes within these cellular powerhouses. This process is carried out by a specific enzyme that precisely trims the mitochondrial proteins at their beginning. If this step is missing, numerous protein complexes lose their stability. This shows a study conducted by a research team led by Prof. Dr. Nora Vögtle of Heidelberg University and Prof. Dr. Pitter Huesgen of the University of Freiburg. The scientists identified a previously unknown mechanism by which human cells stabilize their mitochondrial protein balance.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive motor and psychiatric symptoms. Accumulating evidence has implicated mitochondrial dysfunction as a hallmark of PD; however, its underlying mechanisms, and particularly the role of individual mitochondrial complex I subunits in disease pathogenesis, remain poorly understood.

A new study led by Flinders University has flipped the historic narrative about Australia’s thylacine, finding the native apex predator known as the ‘Tasmanian tiger’ was significantly different from the wolves and wild dogs it was likened to before being hunted to extinction.   

In-depth investigations on historic thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus) skull specimens indicate their jaws were probably unsuited to holding down large animals like sheep – instead their long, deep jaw would have been able to subdue relatively small prey with powerful snapping bites.