Search

Elaborate traits like birdsong are thought to be sexually selected in males but are poorly understood in females. This study shows that year-round territoriality and biparental care are selected for female birdsong, whereas migration, seasonal territoriality, and loss of male care led to losses of female song.

Benchmarking greenhouse gas emissions from wastewater treatment plants is an essential step in developing mitigation strategies. This is now achieved for the USA by modelling over 15,000 facilities using Monte Carlo simulations to obtain a national baseline.

What features distinguish speech from song? Here, the authors show that consistent acoustical spectro-temporal features are sufficient to distinguish speech and song across different societies throughout the world.

Young songbirds learn to imitate their parents’ songs. Here, the authors find that, in baby birds, neurons in a brain region at the interface of auditory and motor circuits signal the onsets of song syllables during both tutoring and babbling, suggesting a specific neural mechanism for vocal imitation.

Birdsong is simultaneously repetitive and highly diverse. Sierro et al. resolve this apparent paradox through experiments in blue tits showing that consistent repetition is a fitness indicator, while song diversity reduces habituation during singing displays.

Young birds rely on auditory feedback when learning to imitate the songs of adult birds. Here the authors find that, as with humans, birds use auditory feedback to correct vocal errors in adulthood. This suggests that lifelong error correction may be a general principle of learned vocal behavior.

R-loops are DNA-RNA hybrids that can cause genome instability if not properly controlled. Here, the authors show that the RNA helicase Brr2 prevents harmful circRNA-associated R-loops, thereby safeguarding transcription and cell division.

Over 20 species of geographically and phylogenetically diverse bird species produce convergent whining vocalizations towards their respective brood parasites. Model presentation and playback experiments across multiple continents suggest that these learned calls provoke an innate response even among allopatric species.

A certain class of neurons in the swamp sparrow forebrain displays a precise auditory–vocal correspondence, and it is shown that these neurons respond in a temporally precise fashion to auditory presentation of certain note sequences in this songbird's repertoire and to similar note sequences in other birds' songs.

The expansion of the photovoltaic industry has created dual challenges of resource supply and waste management. Here, the authors assess the potential of global anthropogenic mineral circularity from photovoltaic waste to mitigate these challenges.

Three electron microscopy datasets are combined to provide a complete connectomic description of the neural circuitry that makes up the neck connective in Drosophila, including the descending neurons, ascending neurons and sensory ascending neurons.

G2E3-catalysed H3K14 mono-ubiquitination is crucial for SUV39H compartmentalization and H3K9 trimethylation in pericentromeric heterochromatin, which is essential for proper euchromatin organization and transcriptional regulation in mammalian cells.

This study shows that restoring mitochondrial respiration in atherosclerotic macrophages reopens their chromatin, enabling phenotype reprogramming. Using targeted liposomes to deliver miR-10a, researchers successfully reduced atherosclerosis in mice by reprogramming macrophage phenotypes. The findings offer a promising epigenetic therapy for atherosclerosis

Thermal lepton pairs are ideal probes for the temperature of quark-gluon plasma. Here, the STAR Collaboration uses thermal electron-positron pair production to measure quark-gluon plasma average temperature at different stages of the evolution.

The NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini–Huygens mission ends in a ‘Grand Finale’ this month, after 13 years in orbit around Saturn. The ESA and NASA JPL project scientists Nicolas Altobelli, Linda J. Spilker and Scott G. Edgington give an overview of the last moments of Cassini’s operational lifetime.

DNA damage from chemotherapy can activate cGAS–STING and interferon pathways. Here, the authors show that cGAS–STING signaling is specific to DNA rich in CA repeats, whereas DNA not rich in CA repeats is detected by AIM2, resulting in opposing tumor immune responses.

Nguyen, Collier et al. find a mitochondria–lysosome inflammatory pathway regulated by the SUMO E3 ligase MAPL, which promotes vesicular mtDNA transport to lysosomes and subsequent gasdermin-dependent lysosomal permeabilization to activate pyroptosis.

A proteotoxic stress response specific to exhausted T cells, governed by AKT signaling and accompanied by increased protein translation, represents a mechanistic vulnerability and a new therapeutic target to improve cancer immunotherapies.

Infant KMT2A-rearranged acute lymphoblastic leukemia is associated with poor overall survival rates. Here, the authors use WGS and WES of 36 relapsed KMT2A-rearranged ALL and AML patients and find alterations in drug response genes in ALL, which may correspond with relapse time. Longitudinal analyses of >250 samples could track residual leukemia cells, clonal drug responses, and the upcoming relapse.

NatD is an acetyltransferase responsible for N-α-terminal acetylation of the histone H4 and H2A and has been linked to cell growth. Here the authors show that NatD-mediated acetylation of histone H4 serine 1 competes with the phosphorylation by CK2α at the same residue thus leading to the upregulation of Slug and tumor progression.

The authors show that NAT10 is upregulated with T cell antigen receptor signaling and that T cell-specific NAT10 deficiency results in diminished numbers of naive T cells, translating to an inability to mount a significant antiviral T cell response.

How do neural circuits evolve to encode new social behaviors? Here we show that in Drosophila santomea, females signal their sexual receptivity by spreading wings in response to male songs, and this recently originated social behavior evolved through the actualization of a pre-existing latent circuit.

Complex motor behaviors such as birdsong are learned through practice and are thought to depend on specific excitatory connectivity in premotor circuits. Here the authors show that song learning in Bengalese Finches is associated with enrichment of inhibitory network connectivity that can affect specific song features.

A new artificial intelligence model, DeepSeek-R1, is introduced, demonstrating that the reasoning abilities of large language models can be incentivized through pure reinforcement learning, removing the need for human-annotated demonstrations.

Neural sequences recorded from the vocal premotor area HVC in juvenile birds learning song ‘syllables’ show ‘prototype’ syllables forming early, with multiple new highly divergent neural sequences emerging from this precursor syllable as learning progresses.

Impaired musical rhythm abilities and developmental speech-language related disorders are biologically and clinically intertwined. Here, the authors explore the correlation between the two traits, finding evidence of epidemiological associations and genetic overlap.

Cardiovascular diseases often co-occur. Here the authors conduct cross-disease genome wide association studies using multi-trait analyses to uncover shared genetic mechanisms contributing to overlapping risk profiles.

Surgery is currently the only treatment option for cataract. Here, the authors report on ocular delivery of lipid nanoparticles-formulated mRNA encoding lanosterol synthase as a potential anti-cataract therapy, which ameliorates cataract development in two rat cataract models.

Anti-TSLP biologics have shown promise for the clinical treatment of type 2 respiratory disease. Here the authors present a clinical trial of CM326, a monoclonal antibody against TSLP, and show the clinical effects in patients with eosinophilic chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps (ECRSwNP), who present with type 2-dominant inflammation.

In sleeping adult zebra finches, forebrain premotor neuron activity is proposed to reflect daytime singing episodes. This study shows that in juvenile songbirds yet to master their song, auditory exposure to an adult 'tutor' song produced profound changes in the premotor neuronal activity during the subsequent sleep session. These changes in night time activity preceded and reflected tutor-song induced changes in singing the next day.

Transient manipulation of neural activity is widely used to probe the function of specific circuits, yet such targeted perturbations could also have indirect effects on downstream circuits that implement separate and independent functions; a study to test this reveals that transient perturbations of specific circuits in mammals and songbirds severely impair learned skills that recover spontaneously after permanent lesions of the same brain areas.

Bayesian models explain how context biases perceptual behavior toward expected categories, but sensory neurons do not reflect this bias. Instead, expectation sharpens sensory acuity, independent of downstream decision making.

Pseudokinases are non-canonical protein-kinase-like proteins deficient in kinase activity, few of which have enzymatic activity that differs from phosphorylation. Now a pseudokinase-enabled cyclization activity for the biosynthesis of ribosomally synthesized and post-translationally modified peptides has been observed. Here pseudokinases can catalyse a Michael addition for (ene)thioether crosslinking through a sandwich-like substrate-assisted process.

Manipulating perineuronal nets (PNNs) in the motor nucleus HVC of zebra finches alters the structure of vocalizations acquired during development, highlighting a causal contribution of PNNs in motor circuitry to the performance of learned behaviors.

Seo et al. present a cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) proteomic profiling of cognitively normal individuals, identifying age-associated, sex-associated, APOE ε4-associated and amyloid-associated changes. They unveil early Alzheimer’s disease CSF-specific proteomic signatures and potential therapeutic targets.