Non-hibernating pikas' protein restriction tweaks their gut microbiome to help them survive the winter, when winter-active herbivores often struggle to find dietary protein

Like us humans, insects possess sensory organs responsible for vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. For vision, insects primarily rely on compound eyes. But what about hearing? For example, crickets develop tympanal organs on their forelegs, which function like a human’s eardrum to detect sound. They use these “ears on the legs” to listen to courtship songs and sense approaching enemies.   The tympanal organs have evolved in insects repeatedly. For example, cicadas, grasshoppers, moths and mantises have tympanal ears on their abdomen or thorax. Uniquely, stinkbugs of the family Dinidoridae, encompassing around 100 species representing ...

Sleep-like slow-wave patterns persist for years in surgically disconnected neural tissue of awake epilepsy patients, according to a study published October 16th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Marcello Massimini from Universita degli Studi di Milano, Italy, and colleagues. The presence of slow waves in the isolated hemisphere impairs consciousness, however, whether they serve any functional or plastic role, remains unclear. Hemispherotomy is a surgical procedure used to treat severe cases of epilepsy in children. The ...

In a Policy Forum, David Victor and colleagues outline a framework for incentivizing meaningful investments into high-risk, transformative clean technologies in the aviation industry. While massive reductions in global emissions are needed to combat climate change, most current clean investments focus on low-risk, mature technologies such as renewable energy, batteries, and electric vehicles. However, many sectors, including aviation, which accounts for about 3% of global emissions, face steep technological and economic barriers to decarbonization, making ...

What looked like a hearing organ on a tiny stinkbug’s leg turned out to be something far stranger: a fungal nursery that mother bugs use to coat their newly laid eggs in protective symbiotic hyphae, shielding their offspring from parasitic wasps. Tympanal organs have repeatedly evolved in many insect species and are often considered to be used for sensing sound. Previous studies have reported a conspicuously enlarged structure on the real legs of adult female dinidorid stinkbugs, which has long been interpreted as a tympanal ...

Although many ecosystems can weather several years of moderate drought, consecutive years of extreme dryness push them past a tipping point, resulting in dramatic declines in plant growth, researchers report. The findings – borne from a global experiment spanning six continents – reveal threats to Earth’s grasslands and shrublands as climate extremes intensify. Although most droughts are brief and moderate, the most ecologically and economically damaging events are both prolonged and extreme. Evidence suggests such extreme events are becoming more frequent with ongoing climate change. However, the effects of multi-year ...

Cutting planet-warming pollution to near-zero will take more than inventing new clean technologies—it will require changing how the world invests in them. That’s especially true for industries like aviation, where developing and adopting greener solutions is risky and expensive, according to a University of California San Diego commentary piece in Science.  The paper calls for smarter ways of managing investment risk could help speed up the shift toward cleaner air travel and other hard-to-decarbonize sectors.   “The aviation sector—a ...

A research team led by Prof. BI Guo-Qiang from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with several domestic and international institutions, has resolved a 50-year-old controversy in neuroscience. By employing a self-developed, time-resolved cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) technique, the team has delineated the intricate choreography of synaptic vesicle (SV) release and rapid recycling, the cornerstone of neural communication. Their findings, which introduce a new biophysical mechanism termed the “Kiss-Shrink-Run”, ...

CORVALLIS, Ore. — Large changes in global sea level, fueled by fluctuations in ice sheet growth and decay, occurred throughout the last ice age, rather than just toward the end of that period, a study publishing this week in the journal Science has found. The findings represent a significant change in researchers’ understanding of how the Pleistocene – the geological period from about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago and commonly known as the last ice age – developed, said Peter Clark, a paleoclimatologist at Oregon State University ...

Researchers uncovered a previously unknown way for microbes within tumors to contribute to treatment resistance in certain cancers  Study finds these microbes push cancer cells into a reversible resting state, allowing them to become resistant to certain chemotherapies  Scientists hope understanding the microbe-tumor relationship will enhance future cancer treatment  HOUSTON, OCTOBER 16, 2025 – Researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have discovered a previously unknown mechanism that explains how bacteria can drive treatment resistance in patients with oral and colorectal cancer. The study was published today in ...

In recent years, Americans have gotten used to logging on to a patient portal through their smartphone or computer to have telehealth appointments with their doctors and health care teams, see their prescriptions and lab test results, send messages to their providers, and much more. But a new study suggests that the integration of this technology into many aspects of patient care may have created an unintended barrier to healthcare access for the more than 25 million patients with limited English proficiency. The study finds that the patient portal login page for many hospitals is not accessible ...