Peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Cell Press covering research across biology, including genetics, ecology, neuroscience, and animal behavior.
Katie Field's team reports in Current Biology that Arabidopsis, a mustard-family model plant, forms a two-way nutrient exchange with an MFRE fungus. Phys.org's account describes no food-crop or field trial, so the step to Brassica crops remains a proposal.
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Caltech neuroscientists traced male fruit flies' threat displays to four major neurons downstream of a cluster of five to seven cells per brain hemisphere. Activating the neurons in pairs reproduced the display's wing and leg movements.
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Researchers report in Current Biology that the archaeon Sukunaarchaeum mirabile has a 238-kilobase-pair genome, the smallest ever seen in its domain. The sequence shows nearly no metabolism but intact copying machinery, so its status as a cell rests on inference.
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Chinstrap penguins on Zavodovski Island fell about 63% between 2011 and 2025, from roughly 542,000 pairs to 201,000, a drone and satellite survey found. The authors attribute it mainly to regional ocean warming and falling krill supply.
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Case Western Reserve researchers found hundreds more hair cells across squid bodies than were known, in a study in Current Biology. The team hopes the animals can help explain human hearing loss, a case that so far rests on anatomy mapped in squid.
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Sukunaarchaeum, a marine archaeon with 189 protein-coding genes, carries genes for copying its DNA and making proteins but almost none for food or energy. That puts it nearer an independent cell than an organelle, though so far the only evidence is its genome.
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Stanford geneticist Greg Barsh and colleagues traced orange fur in cats to a 5-kilobase deletion in non-coding DNA just ahead of the Arhgap36 gene. The gap turned up in every orange cat they examined, evidence that the DNA controlling how strongly a gene is expressed can set a long-studied sex-linked trait.
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British Antarctic Survey aerial surveys found 63% fewer occupied chinstrap penguin nests on Zavodovski Island in 2025 than in 2011. The researchers blame krill moving south as the sea warms and say the birds may now count as endangered.
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Rutgers-led physics models of four mosasaur skeletons find Platecarpus and Tylosaurus lunged faster for their size than Mosasaurus and Plotosaurus. Most of that gap comes from how far each tail could curl, so the split in hunting styles is an inference drawn from anatomy.
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Cambridge-led researchers tracing collagen-eating enzymes in 700 bacterial genomes found they reached oxygen-using bacteria around the end of the Ediacaran. That timing matches the fall in soft-bodied fossils, so later gaps may record faster decay, a case built on matching dates.
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Stockholm-led paleogeneticists built 20 ancient genomes from unidentifiable Siberian bone scraps and found a yak relative that diverged 400,000 years ago. The result argues for sequencing fragments that shape cannot place, though the animal still needs anatomy before it gets a formal name.
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Case Western Reserve researchers mapped hair cells across squid skin and found bundles at the mantle's front edge about a fifth as long as those on the head. The layout suggests squid tune each cell partly by bundle length, as the human ear does for pitch.
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York University researchers found macaque neurons shift their code for a still target's position after motion adaptation, as human perception does. The AI vision networks they tested showed no such shift, so the team proposes the illusion as a NeuroAI benchmark.
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University of Geneva researchers find fruit-fly clock neurons inhibit dopamine relay cells on a 24-hour rhythm to gate daytime wakefulness. That puts the step where time of day becomes alertness in a middle layer of cells, so far shown only in flies.
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Researchers filmed 10 shoals of clonal Amazon mollies for 55 days and found group behaviour shifted in ways the members' traits do not explain. The authors credit social interaction as the fish mature, an idea the observational design fits but has not yet tested.
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Scientists have recognized Bolivia's Leopardus tilcayo as a new tiger cat species, the first new wild cat described in over a century. It is one of five tiger cat species, though what the split means for conservation depends on data the coverage does not include.
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An Iwate University-led team reports 13 branched-chain fatty acids that differ between cats but hold steady within one, and traces them to kidney lipid droplets catalogued over a century ago.
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The wiring of a male fruit fly's brain and nerve cord is now public, and the payload for anyone planning a bigger map is a claimed thousandfold gain in connectome efficiency whose denominator nobody has stated.
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The best Mesozoic feather yet described came out of a coprolite from Montana's Hell Creek, and it belonged to a flightless diver the asteroid killed, which makes modern feather architecture older than the survivors.
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Leopardus tilcayo of the Bolivian Yungas was counted inside Leopardus tigrinus until 38 sequenced genomes separated it. The living animal itself is known from two individuals, one of them a captive male.
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Science · September 4, 2026 · Confirmed3 publishers
Science · September 1, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers