A UC Berkeley study found that social prairie voles lacking the receptor for oxytocin are slow to form friendships, are less motivated to reach their friends, and are less aggressive toward and avoidant of unfamiliar peers. This points toward a role for oxytocin in both the ‘approach’ and ‘avoid’ sides of maintaining specific friendships, affecting selectivity.

Rice University computer scientist Luay Nakhleh, who also serves as the dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing, has received a $1.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build a powerful new software infrastructure that could significantly expand how scientists study evolution. The project, titled PhyNetPy, aims to bring the next generation of evolutionary modeling tools into the hands of researchers around the world by enabling the widespread use of phylogenetic networks — complex, nontreelike models of evolutionary history.

Scientists from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have reimagined the pollination process by developing a new system that uses gene editing to create flowers that can be easily pollinated by AI-controlled robots working round the clock.

A 50-year love affair with hairy caterpillars reveals their squirmy secrets

Western tent caterpillars might not be on your mind every year, but during their peak outbreaks, they’re impossible to ignore—hairy larvae wriggling across roads and swarms of caterpillars climbing houses to form yellow silken cocoons.

They’re certainly on the mind of Dr. Judith Myers, UBC professor, who has spent five decades studying this native moth species and their boom-and-bust population cycles.

In this Q&A, she discusses her journey and findings from  a recently published study, including the caterpillars’ surprising resistance to climate change.

To try to solve the puzzle of how the infection persisted and spread over thousands of years in Eurasia, an international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Infection Biology, Harvard University, the University of Arkansas, the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, and Seoul National University investigated the bones and teeth of Bronze Age livestock at the pastoralist site Arkaim (Russia), a Eurasian Steppe site belonging to the Sintashta-Petrovka culture known for its innovations in cattle, sheep, and horse husbandry. There they identified a 4,000-year-old sheep infected with the same LNBA lineage of Y. pestis that was infecting people at the time.

Targeting cellular structures called nuclear speckles could be a completely new approach for treating Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and prion diseases, according to new research led by the University of Pittsburgh.