How food is shared inside ant colonies has long been invisible in real time. Researchers in Japan have now used a highly sensitive radioactive imaging technique to watch food move from ant to ant, minute by minute. The method reveals unexpected patterns in how resources spread through a group and could help scientists detect early warning signs of stress or imbalance in insect societies, crucial to ecosystems and agriculture.

Vocalization feedback monitoring, i.e., listening to one’s vocalizations during vocal production, plays a pivotal role in vocal production control and learning in humans and other mammals. So far, the auditory system has been routinely studied using playback experiments on restrained, non-vocalizing animals. Now, writing in the journal SCIENCE CHINA Life Sciences, a team of researchers from Jinhong Luo – Central China Normal University established an ethological paradigm and recorded the single-unit activities of inferior colliculus (IC) in unrestrained, vocalizing bats that could move their head and ears freely. The data suggest the IC as a crucial auditory center for distinguishing between self-produced vocalizations and external sounds.

Artificial light at night not only alters the landscape, but also profoundly disrupts natural ecosystems. A recent study by the RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau shows that light pollution can significantly disrupt the exchange of energy and nutrients between bodies of water and their surrounding habitats – sometimes even more than non-native species. Thus, lighting along riverbanks or streams can have far-reaching ecological consequences. The results were published in the journal Functional Ecology. 

Cancer treatment and other delicate medical procedures could one day be carried out using tiny microrobots guided precisely inside the body after scientists developed a new magnetic tool to control them.

Researchers created a bismuth-coordinated melanin material that provides in vivo physical radiation shielding and ROS scavenging. It markedly mitigates acute radiation syndrome and boosts mouse survival from 20% to 60% after lethal total body irradiation.