New research suggests that heat stress increases the occurrence of same-sex sexual interactions between male burying beetles – but also that a surprising amount of male-male encounters occur under control conditions. This ongoing project is currently investigating whether a possible trade-off between heat-protection and social communication cuticular hydrocarbons may be involved in possible sex recognition errors, and if these behaviours may result in any costs to reproductive success.

New research finds that the “silent” mutant male crickets of Hawaii, first observed over 20 years ago, have now become well-established across the Hawaiian islands, and that the reproductive challenges caused by a lack of courtship song may be offset by a much earlier maturation into adulthood, providing a wider window for breeding opportunities. This research also reveals the existence of multiple different sound-reducing morphs, all with their own unique mutations that disrupt the cricket’s ability to create songs.

New research is redefining the morphological and functional existence of anatomical “neck” regions to better include previously exempted vertebrates such as fishes and amphibians, changing the status quo of what it means to have a neck.

A new genetic screening method allows researchers to efficiently modulate individual genes across entire tissues and provides new insights into human development.

Research has shed intriguing new light on the genetics underlying the diverse plant organ shapes we see in agriculture and nature.

Parental care appears to have evolved in ants by repurposing ancient neural circuits rather than inventing entirely new brain systems. Because the same family of neuropeptides regulates caregiving in ants and mammals, evolution may have relied on a common molecular blueprint for social behavior. The findings establish ants as a powerful new model for studying how parenting came to be. Moreover, because the researchers found that caregiving behaviors change over an ant’s lifetime, their findings also contribute insights into how healthy aging naturally reshapes the brain and behavior.

University of Utah bioengineer Russell Stewart as long studied caddisfly silk, which contain adhesives that work underwater , in search of a compound for use in the human body in medical applications. Now the genetics of caddisflies’ evolutionary superpower is coming into focus, providing science with new clues for developing bioadhesives.

If we want to dismiss something as irrelevant, we’d say that it’s “as boring as watching the grass grow.” And yet grasses—including corn, wheat and rice—make up the majority of the plant-based calories that humans eat, as well as the majority of calories fed to livestock. Perhaps we should have been paying attention to such an important plant, because we now know, thanks to new research led by biologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published in Current Biology, that grasses grow according to temperature—not light, like other plants.