State and local officials in Florida maintain hundreds coops with what are referred to as sentinel chickens, which act as an early alarm system for the presence of mosquito-borne illnesses in an area. This alarm system just got an upgrade.

Genes are the building blocks of life, and the genetic code provides the instructions for the complex processes that make organisms function. But how and why did it come to be the way it is? A recent study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign sheds new light on the origin and evolution of the genetic code, providing valuable insights for genetic engineering and bioinformatics.

Several genetic variants associated with social behavior in honey bees are located within genes that have previously been linked to social behavior in humans, Ian Traniello at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, and colleagues report on September 16^th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology. The results hint at ancient roots to social behavior that have been conserved across species.