When public health researchers want to know whether diseases such as COVID-19 or polio are circulating in a community, they can look for genetic evidence in wastewater.

Entomologist Dana Price wondered whether the same principle could be applied to mosquitoes. The question led to an unconventional experiment.

“What we did, colloquially, was build a mosquito toilet,” said Price, an associate professor at the Center for Vector Biology, Department of Entomology in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and a lead author of a study published in Microbiology Spectrum.

Researchers at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Helsinki have demonstrated that a drug called vatinoxan significantly improves the safety and quality of anaesthesia in rats. The finding can affect a large number of laboratory animals globally since, in Western countries alone, more than one hundred million rodents are estimated to be used every year in biomedical research.

As Africa prepares for the arrival of a powerful El Niño weather event, an international team of researchers has found that access to improved forecasts alone will not protect many of the region’s poorest livestock farmers from the impacts of climate change.

Okayama University of Science has teamed up with the 1,100-year-old Okayama Shrine to create a unique goshuin, a traditional Japanese shrine seal, featuring Tarbosaurus, one of Asia’s largest carnivorous dinosaurs. Scientifically supervised by the university’s Department of Dinosaur Paleontology, the collaboration brings together dinosaur research and Japanese tradition while encouraging visitors to discover Okayama’s growing connection to dinosaurs.

Snails carry weather records on their backs that could be used to map prehistoric cyclones, a University of Queensland study has shown.

The story of Prof Dan Blumstein’s decision to share videos of the marmots in the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory’s field study on an OnlyFans account called OnlyMarms has captured the world over the last few weeks. 64 years of research into marmots can provide incredible insights into their evolution and socioecology, but the study is as expensive to run as it is valuable — and funding challenges have forced Blumstein, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA and Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Conservation Science, to innovate in new and surprising ways. In this instalment of Frontier Scientists, Blumstein explains to us why this long-running study of yellow-bellied marmots is so important for science, how funding losses are putting it at risk, and how he’s fighting back.