A University of Cambridge study of adult mammary gland development has revealed new genes involved in breastfeeding, and provided insights into how genetic changes may be associated with breastfeeding disorders and postpartum breast cancers.

Researchers led by Noah Cowan at Johns Hopkins University have secured NIH funding to probe how animals alternate between "explore" (sensing) and "exploit" (task-oriented) behaviors in uncertain environments, using the weakly electric glass knifefish as  a model. The team includes researchers from four universities who will integrate their expertise in neuroscience, math, engineering, and machine learning to build on 2023 findings in  Nature Machine Intelligence that revealed the explore/exploit pattern across species from amoebas to humans. The project aims to decode decision triggers, with implications for robotics and medicine.

Researchers at the Salk Institute, UC San Diego, and Washington University have gathered novel details on undernourished children’s gut microbe populations in the largest study of its kind to-date, identifying dozens of new microbes to form an unprecedented database. They found that gut microbiome diversity and genome stability may be a powerful marker for whether children thrive or suffer. Their findings pave the way for diagnostic and preventative solutions for undernourished children around the globe, while also opening the opportunity for innovations across other public health crises from obesity to malaria to COVID-19.

Dr. Tanja Stratmann has been awarded the prestigious Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). Starting in 2026, Dr. Stratmann will spend five years researching the nitrogen cycle of living and fossil sponges at MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen.

A pioneering study led by the University of Oxford in collaboration with international partners has applied AI for the first time to count the Great Wildebeest Migration from satellite images. Unexpectedly, the results showed fewer than 600,000 individual wildebeest – less than half the previous estimate of 1.3 million animals. The results have been published today (9 Sept) in PNAS Nexus.