Some of the giant marine reptiles that ruled the seas during the age of dinosaurs were better built for surprise attacks, while their relatives were better suited to chasing prey through open water, according to a Rutgers-led study.

These animals, known as mosasaurs, were a group of lizards adapted to life in the ocean. Researchers reconstructed the bodies of four kinds of mosasaurs from their fossil skeletons, then applied principles of physics to estimate how quickly each could surge forward with a single powerful sweep of its tail. The research was published in the latest edition of Current Biology.

More than 80 years ago scientists discovered that differences in yellow pigmentation were critical to courtship success and failure for fruit flies. 

The “top predator” from the Jurassic is relatively small in size: Megacauda sungei measures just half a meter from its nose to the tip of its tail. 165 million years ago, the furry ancestor to today’s mammals hunted its prey in water. The cusps of its teeth were also curved backwards to enable it to catch its slippery prey. However, the true evolutionary revolution is its soft palate, which separates the oral cavity from the pharynx while also enabling swallowing and breathing. This is an important requirement for suckling as a survival advantage. The findings by researchers from the Universities of Shenyang, Chicago, and Bonn are now being published in the journal ‘Nature’. 

At the University of Missouri, plant scientist Ron Mittler is rewriting the playbook for how scientists study life by asking what happens when living organisms face multiple stresses at once.

Genetic information may play an increasingly important role in the personalized preventive medicine of the future. Whole-genome sequencing could open up new possibilities for identifying susceptibility and risk for specific diseases even before symptoms appear, emphasizes Dr. Gyula Richárd Nagy, a clinical geneticist at Semmelweis University. However, to achieve this, we must first accurately ‘read’ our genome — that is, the billions of DNA letters — with increasing precision. We must also ensure that the reference base we are comparing it to is appropriate. A study published in the prestigious US journal GeroScience, which involved researchers from Semmelweis University, sheds light on this important yet little-known issue for the future of preventive genomics.

A new multimodal 4D dataset developed at Institute of Science Tokyo provides a detailed model of how humans and dogs interact through movement, gestures, and speech. The curated dataset “InterPet4D” comprises 6.83 million synchronized frames obtained from 23 human participants and 13 dogs representing 11 breeds. Additionally, the researchers developed an AI framework, InterPetMoGen, using this dataset to predict and generate dog movements responding to human actions and audio cues.

Tokyo, Japan- Prediction is a defining feature of intelligent behavior. Researchers at The University of Tokyo developed a spiking-network model that learned what event would occur, when it would occur, and how likely it was. The single network rapidly recalibrated when timing or probabilities changed, using local learning. The findings suggest a computational framework for adaptive, brain-inspired AI and testable ideas about how neural systems update expectations across dynamic environments and changing real-world conditions.