Watch a spider’s heart race when traffic gets too loud Study captures a hidden stress response in roadside orb weavers

Never thought I'd be able to see a spider's heart beating with the naked eye. 🕷️ Cool story by Olivia Maule at @science.org

a blue tit peeking into a wooden nestbox

Planning a nestbox temperature manipulation experiment in birds? We’ve just published a preprint that may be useful! 🪺🪶

We review 46 studies and also share our own blue tit pilot experiment from Wytham Woods, highlighting some very real practical challenges doi.org/10.32942/X25387

Salmon swimming in cocaine-polluted water

Fish exposed to cocaine pollution swim up to about 1.9 times farther per week and, as a result, disperse up to about 12.3 km farther than their control counterparts

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Dynamics of genetic and somatic trade-offs in ageing and mortality - Nature Mapping DNA variants that modulate mortality using a starting population of 6,438 young mice defined 29 distinct loci that influence lifespan and mortality with divergent age-...

New in Nature: We mapped the genetics of aging across the entire lifespan of 6,438 mice. 59 loci, modulate the genetics of *when* you die, not just whether a gene associates with lifespan.

#Longevity #Aging #Genetics #Healthspan

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Promiscuity and parental behavior in birds are driven by demographics, not the other way around New research shows that variation in mating behaviors, parental care and differences in ornamentation of the sexes in bird species is driven by demographics rather than vice versa.

Demographic factors, rather than mating or parental behaviors, primarily drive adult sex ratio differences in birds, influencing sexual selection, ornamentation, and parental roles across species. doi.org/hbx54t

The American Naturalist classic cover

Are seminal fluid proteins a male tool to manipulate females against their interests? Or do females have a say as well? Michalak et al. argue that if females can detect seminal fluids, using it as information can benefit both sexes.

Read now ahead of print!
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

Outplaying elite table tennis players with an autonomous robot Nature, Published online: 22 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10338-5An autonomous robot system, Ace, combines event-based vision and reinforcement learning to compete with elite human table tennis players, highlighting the potential of physical AI agents to perform complex, real-time interactive tasks.

Outplaying elite table tennis players with an autonomous robot @Nature.com

Organismal robustness and resilience to declining temperature predict reproductive outcomes in a wild #bird Taff et al. show that cold conditions are associated with lower mass, slower growth, and higher mortality in adult and nestling tree swallows. Extensive automated behavioral monitoring demonstrates that adults differ in their behavioral robustness and resilience to declining temperatures. This variation is, in turn, correlated with reproductive outcomes.

Organismal robustness and resilience to declining temperature predict reproductive outcomes in a wild #bird CurrentBiology

The misunderstood sex chromosome: how X affects your health Researchers are gaining a new appreciation for the genes on the X and Y chromosomes and how they shape sex differences in health and disease susceptibility.

Researchers are gaining a new appreciation for the genes on the X and Y chromosomes and how they shape responses to drugs, disease susceptibility, and more

go.nature.com/4cqnQ3p

The selfish ribosome In this Essay, the evolution of life is construed as a ribosomal takeover, whereby the ribosome evolved to consume most of the cell’s resources, while other cellular componentry ensured the…

Could the #ribosome be a selfish element? @mkrupovic.bsky.social & Eugene Koonin propose that the #evolution of life can viewed as a ribosomal takeover, where the ribosome evolved to consume most of the cell’s resources.
🧪 #OriginsOfLife

If you didn’t know, bedbugs mate by traumatic insemination where males bypass the female reproductive tract. We’ve been looking into the female and male sides of this fascinating and gruesome mating biology (follow the links for our two recent preprints). www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Reconstructing mammalian lifespan evolution reveals strong phylogenetic effects and lifespan-associated genes
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

When humidity changes, so do the colors of sweat bees Nature is a riot of color. In the animal kingdom, many species, from insects to cephalopods, use their permanent color or change it for communication, camouflage, and thermoregulation.

Sweat bees display reversible color changes in response to humidity, shifting from deep blue-green in dry conditions to coppery green as humidity rises, both in the lab and in nature. doi.org/hbx5wj

Maternal age and density shape offspring foraging strategies in a predatory mite
#Invertebrate #PhenotypicPlasticity

doi.org/10.1093/behe...

Peaceful queen succession in the naked mole rat Queen succession in naked-mole rats can occur peacefully, maintaining colony stability without conflict.

Infamous for bloody wars of succession, naked mole rat colonies typically rely on the reproductive success of one queen breeder.

Now, researchers in #ScienceAdvances report a rare instance of peaceful succession and plural breeding in a captive colony. https://scim.ag/4vraADj

New paper out in @natureportfolio.nature.com @commsearth.nature.com!

A major bottleneck in coral restoration is that newly settled corals rarely survive.

We show that simple engineered substrates can increase early-stage survivorship by ~4×.

Link to paper: rdcu.be/femTN

Sexual Selection Associated With an Aggressive Male Phenotype Reduces Population Size and Hinders Population Recovery After Heat Stress Using experiments on soil mites, we show that sexual selection associated with an armed and aggressive male phenotype can reduce population size and stability, which lowers their resilience against a...

New paper out in #Ecology Letters: We manipulated the presence of "fighter" and "scrambler" males in soil mite populations and showed that aggressive male behaviour reduces population size and stability. 🧪#SexualSelection #PopulationEcology onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Response of Protein Coding Genes and microRNAs to Temperature Changes in Four Species of Drosophilids Abstract. Insects are the most abundant described living animals in the world, and they play important roles in the environment and in human society. Clima

Tsang et al. used four species of Drosophila to investigate how climate affects gene expression in different sexes of insects, showing that protein-coding genes and microRNAs have undergone different selection between sexes.

🔗 doi.org/10.1093/gbe/...

#genome #evolution #drosophila

Resource abundance can buffer trophic mismatch in a caterpillar-passerine food-chain

doi.org/10.32942/X2K...

Feels like this paper on protein-templated DNA synthesis by a natural enzyme warrants some comment.
So here's a 🧵. /1
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Evolutionary landscapes of zygotic genome activation across animals www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

Evolution and adaptations of the seminal proteome in an insect with traumatic insemination www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

I am so excited to share our new findings with you! We provide the structural evidence for a direct protein-to-DNA information pathway, showing how a bacterial enzyme 'reads' its own structure to 'write' DNA. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

New @currentbiology.bsky.social paper from Dr. Leila Elabbady on neural circuits that transform a touch stimulus into spatially targeted grooming.

Leila discovered a leg somatotopic map and used it to infer tactile receptive fields in the fly VNC connectome.

authors.elsevier.com/a/1mvu83QW8S...

The fitness costs of reproductive specialization scale inversely with organismal size Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 15, April 2026. The evolution of reproductive specialization, in which somatic cells forfeit reproduction, represents a fundamental innovation in complex multicellular life. This specialization imposes a fitness cost: because somatic cells do not produce offspring, ...

The fitness costs of reproductive specialization scale inversely with organismal size @PNAS.org

Monkeys navigate a virtual forest with thought alone, pushing brain-computer interfaces beyond the lab As a part of a study testing out a new type of implanted brain-computer interface (BCI), three rhesus monkeys controlled movements in a virtual reality (VR) world using only brain signals.

Monkeys have used implanted brain-computer interfaces to navigate complex virtual environments using only brain signals, highlighting progress toward practical assistive technologies for real-world use. doi.org/hbxf5p

Parental age at reproduction accelerates offspring pace of life in Gryllus bimaculatus www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.04...

Sex effects on gene expression across the human cerebral cortex at cell type resolution | Science Sex differences in neurodevelopmental, psychiatric, and neurodegenerative disease susceptibility may arise from sex chromosome and hormonal influences on cell type–specific gene expression. We present a single-cell transcriptomic analysis of adult human ...

Sex effects on gene expression across the human cerebral cortex at cell type resolution | Science @Science.org

When sexual selection through mate choice depletes versus exaggerates genetic variation: Unraveling the lek paradox | PNAS The evolution of female preferences for male display traits relies on females receiving indirect benefits from their mate. This requires substantia...

Kuangyi Xu, a current EEB postdoc at UToronto and a former student in my lab, spearheaded this new dissection of the lek paradox. It often doesn't hold! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Adaptive Evolution of FOXO Family Regulating Lifespan Extension and Cancer Resistance in Long‐Lived Species We found that four FOXO genes were under rapidly evolution and positive selection in long-lived species. Our cell experiments revealed that bowhead whale FOXO3 and FOXO4 exhibited tumor-suppressive e...

Adaptive Evolution of FOXO Family Regulating Lifespan Extension and Cancer Resistance in Long-Lived Species
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...