Topic
Scientific field studying how species, traits, and behaviors arise and change over time through natural selection, adaptation, and speciation.
Chinese researchers who sequenced 16 new mayfly genomes report that mayflies and dragonflies form one group, Palaeoptera, sister to wing-folding insects. Their fossil-calibrated clock puts crown-group winged insects in the Early Devonian.
Reality
University of Vienna researchers report an ancient DNA reshuffling that brought separate gene regions into contact in coleoid cephalopods. The Nature Communications paper proposes the new contacts may have helped drive their unusually complex nervous systems.
Reality
Joao Menezes and Jeff Podos of UMass Amherst report in Evolution that body size and especially beak width track call volume across 123 bird species. Their tests of mating behaviour, habitat density and flight ability found no general reason why extreme loudness evolved.
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Exeter and Essex researchers report in Nature that butterfly wing patterns in flight create motion illusions, widespread across about 400 European species. The finding is presented as helping explain why so few predators hunt butterflies on the wing, though the tests used bird-vision models and human volunteers.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Würzburg biologists date New World blackbirds' first move into South America to about 6 million years ago, roughly 3 million years earlier than past estimates. Their model has the family starting in North America and crossing south before the Isthmus of Panama had fully formed.
Reality
TranscriptFormer learned gene expression the way a language model learns text, across 12 species from single-celled yeast to humans. Its cross-species matches arrive as hypotheses a bench experiment still has to test.
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Sticklebacks bred for two generations in identical Bern tanks still did best at the exact stream their grandparents came from. Local adaptation sits at a finer scale than the lake-versus-stream contrast.
Reality
A Current Biology study mapped social behavior onto two large insect phylogenies and found nearly the whole signal comes from the stinging wasps, bees and ants.
Reality