Helping out your neighbor or minding your own business? A challenging choice with different benefits for each decision. Game theory provides guidance in making such choices—from a theoretical perspective. Novel findings by Jakub Svoboda and Krishnendu Chatterjee at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) reveal new network structures that enhance cooperation throughout a system. These insights have potential applications also in biology.

The opensource LabEmbryoCam uses 3D-printed components to form a robotic microscope and is the result of over a decade of research at the University of Plymouth. Its creators say the instrument can autonomously monitor the earliest stages of development in any aquatic species.

Hummingbird bills — their long, thin beaks — look a little like drinking straws. But new research shows just how little water, or nectar, that comparison holds. University of Washington scientists have discovered that the hummingbird bill is surprisingly flexible. While drinking, a hummingbird rapidly opens and shuts different parts of its bill simultaneously, engaging in an intricate and highly coordinated dance with its tongue to draw up nectar at lightning speeds.

The Africa-UBC Oceans and Fisheries Visiting Fellows Program is extremely pleased to announce the selection of its inaugural laureates: Dr. Cynthia A. Adinortey (Ghana) and Dr. Antony Otinga Oteng’o (Kenya). The Africa-UBC Oceans and Fisheries Visiting Fellows program has opened applications for its 2025 cohort.

The University of Pennsylvania's Aman Husbands, of the School of Arts & Sciences, uncovered surprising ways transcription factors, the genetic switches for genes, regulate plant development. Their findings reveal how subtle changes in a lipid-binding region called the START domain can dramatically alter gene regulation, paving the way for advancements in crop engineering, synthetic biology, and precision gene therapies.

In a new study published in Nature Communications, a team of researchers at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology report a new, robust computational toolset to extract biological relationships from large transcriptomics datasets. These efforts will help scientists better investigate cellular processes.

The fungus that causes coffee wilt disease repeatedly took up segments of DNA from a related fungal pathogen, which contributed to successive outbreaks of the disease. Lily Peck of Imperial College London, UK, reports these new findings in a study published December 5^th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.