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Alston's singing mouse has emerged as an intriguing model for the comparative study of vocal control. New work on the species sets the stage to understand the proximate mechanisms and evolutionary roots of novel acoustic communication traits.

Upper tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC) is a rare malignancy arising from the renal pelvis or ureter and is often diagnosed at an advanced stage. Prognosis depends strongly on tumor stage and grade, but remains poorer than that of bladder urothelial carcinoma. This review article summarizes current evidence on the management of locally advanced but resectable UTUC, focusing on perioperative systemic therapy, clinical guideline recommendations, and emerging therapeutic strategies. In high risk cases, radical nephroureterectomy (RNU) with bladder cuff excision is the surgical state of the art. To reduce relapse rates, perioperative systemic therapy is gaining increasing importance. Neoadjuvant platinum-based chemotherapy (+/- durvalumab) has shown promising rates of pathological downstaging, however, high level evidence is still lacking. In contrast, evidence for adjuvant therapy is stronger. Adjuvant platinum-based chemotherapy should be offered to patients with pT2-pT4 or pN+ disease within 90 days after RNU. Immune checkpoint inhibitors show activity in perioperative settings, but potential benefits in UTUC subgroups remain unclear. There are ongoing trials combining immunotherapy, chemotherapy, or targeted agents. Molecular profiling and novel strategies, such as mRNA vaccines and antibody-drug conjugates, may enable more personalized approaches and reshape the therapeutic landscape of UTUC. Management of locally advanced but resectable UTUC is evolving rapidly, driven by advances in perioperative systemic therapies and a growing understanding of the disease's molecular biology. However, prognosis remains poor, underscoring the need to further improve treatment options.

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems have achieved remarkable capabilities, but at an extraordinary energy cost. Training and running large-scale models can consume vast resources, posing environmental, economic, and societal challenges. In contrast, biological brains perform lifelong learning, adaptive control, and flexible reasoning using orders of magnitude less energy for learning and adaptation over a lifetime. What accounts for this difference - and how can it guide future AI development? In this review, we identify key biological principles that support energy-efficient capacities in biological brains, and consider how they might inform the design of more sustainable artificial systems. We organize our analysis around three domains: architectural constraints, signaling strategies, and learning algorithms. In each domain, we discuss concrete observations from biology, from cell to circuit to cognitive level, and describe how current and emerging AI systems mirror or diverge from these motifs. One striking feature of biological energy optimization is often overlooked: that brains are remarkably stable in their energy usage across heterogeneous modes, suggesting they may minimize energy needs during active environmental processing through maximizing the utility of 'rest-like' background processes. Overall, rather than advocating for biomimicry for its own sake, we argue for biologically informed engineering. Understanding how natural systems minimize energetic cost while maximizing flexibility may help us build AI that is not only powerful, but also efficient, equitable, and environmentally responsible.

Personalized oncology seeks to selectively block specific dysregulated pathways to arrest cancer development. Increased glutamine metabolism is a hallmark of cancer, and 6-diazo-5-oxo-L-norleucine (DON), a structural analog of L-glutamine, was the first compound used to target the exacerbated nitrogen metabolism observed in cancer cells. However, its clinical application was limited by unacceptable toxicity. With the same goal of blocking glutamine metabolism, several specific glutaminase inhibitors have been characterized in recent decades, showing promising antitumor activity. Nevertheless, this strategy frequently induces adaptive metabolic resistance that must be counteracted. In this context, glutaminase has become a key target in combination therapies for several tumor types aimed at restricting anabolic adaptation when single metabolic therapy fails, emerging as a possible synergistic therapeutic intervention. Consequently, combination therapies that include glutaminase inhibition alongside additional agents to counteract the metabolic plasticity of cancer have emerged as a promising approach in personalized antitumor pharmacology. This review provides a historical-to-translational overview of glutamine-targeted therapies, with particular emphasis on glutaminase inhibitors, including compound 968, BPTES, CB-839, and next-generation inhibitors, as well as DON-derived prodrugs. We discuss their mechanisms of action and their integration with chemotherapy, targeted therapies, radiotherapy, and immunotherapy, highlighting how glutamine metabolism targeting influences tumor metabolic adaptation, redox homeostasis, therapy resistance, and tumor-immune interactions. Finally, we examine current clinical developments, emerging therapeutic combinations, and the challenges that must be addressed for the incorporation of glutamine metabolism targeting into precision oncology.

Sleep serves a fundamental role in memory consolidation, but this can be influenced by physiological context. For instance, satiated Drosophila require sleep for appetitive memory consolidation, but starved flies that must forage for food switch to sleep-independent memory. As ethanol intoxication alters behaviors such as sleep and memory, we asked how it affects the role of sleep in memory consolidation. Here, we demonstrate that acute ethanol inverts the canonical link between sleep and memory in Drosophila. Ethanol selectively impairs memory consolidation in satiated flies by causing a switch to sleep-independent memory, which then cannot be supported because of ethanol-induced sedation. Under these conditions, sleep deprivation rescues memory and requires the upregulation of neuropeptide F (NPF), which signals through NPF receptors on PPL1 dopaminergic neurons. We suggest that reward-seeking behaviors, induced by starvation or ethanol, invoke sleep-independent memory. However, ethanol has a paradoxical impact, wherein it induces a switch to sleep-independent memory but concurrently promotes sedation, thereby causing sleep to become detrimental to memory consolidation.

Amandine Cornille is Associate Professor of Biology at New York University Abu Dhabi, where she leads the ECLECTIC group on the ecology and (epi)genomics of tree responses to global change. An evolutionary biologist and population genomicist, she studies how biodiversity is generated, maintained, and reshaped by interactions among genomes, environments, and human societies. Her work focuses on trees, including fruit trees and their wild relatives, to understand their domestication, adaptation, and resilience to climate change.

Board games are usually played with other people across the lifespan. They seem to improve executive functions, which are psychological processes key to our daily lives. Therefore, this systematic review aimed to show whether board games could improve executive functions at different ages. At first, 5288 studies were found in four databases (Scopus, WOS, PsycINFO, and Medline). Twenty-four studies met the inclusion criteria for the systematic review, and 16 studies were included in the meta-analytical analysis. In the systematic review, we especially found effects in verbal short-term memory in children. In addition, the meta-analysis showed significant results for visuospatial short-term memory in kindergarten and processing speed in older people. We also assessed heterogeneity and conducted a meta-regression analysis considering the risk of bias. High heterogeneity was observed in some meta-analyses. Overall, the results suggest that the current empirical evidence is not yet sufficient to support a strong recommendation for the use of board games to improve executive functions. However, the findings are promising and highlight the potential of board games as a cognitive intervention. Therefore, future well-designed randomized controlled trials are needed to clarify the effectiveness of such interventions.

A central goal of evolutionary biology is to understand the molecular mechanisms that enable adaptive responses to novel environmental pressures. Extreme weather events like natural disasters can have catastrophic impacts on wildlife via habitat destruction, mortality,1,2,3,4,5,6 population displacement,6,7 and natural selection,1,2,5,8,9 even shaping broad biogeographic patterns of local adaptation on phylogenetic scales.10,11 However, few studies have investigated the functional changes in organismal performance or genomic targets associated with responses to such events.2,12,13,14 Here, we investigate mechanisms of hurricane-mediated selection associated with parallel morphological shifts observed in a small island endemic lizard, the Silver Key Anole (Anolis scriptus), on two islands of the Turks and Caicos struck by hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017.9 These observed changes suggest directional selection on clinging ability in the face of hurricane-force winds.9,10,12,15 Genome scans for parallel selection identified five loci with known roles in musculoskeletal development and function. Among these loci, hs6st1 displayed the most significant genome-wide association with the length of the longest rear toe. CRISPR-induced knockout of hs6st1 resulted in significant toe length reduction and complete toe agenesis. Simulated high wind speeds revealed that shorter rear toe length was associated with greater clinging performance in anoles. This study highlights the interactions between performance, morphology, and genetic variation underlying rapid adaptive responses to extreme weather events in the wild. As extreme weather events become more frequent and severe in the coming decades,16,17 understanding their evolutionary impacts will be critical for assessing their long-term effects on the world's biodiversity.18.

Much of biology focuses on how genetic changes mediate new functions, but less attention is given to adaptations within the ancient molecular machines that execute the central dogma. Octopuses exhibit complex nervous systems and sophisticated behaviors that rival vertebrates but via an entirely divergent evolutionary history. Here, we serendipitously discovered that octopus ribosomes contain a structural break in the core ribosomal RNA that is unique among all animals. This break site enhances translation fidelity to reduce miscoding and subsequent protein aggregation, even when engineered into evolutionarily distant bacterial ribosomes. Furthermore, high-fidelity translation by octopus ribosomes supports proteomic stability during extensive RNA editing observed in cephalopods, suggesting synergy between distinct non-canonical modes of gene regulation. This adaptation emerged in recently derived octopuses with expanded nervous systems, thereby revealing a mechanism that could broadly support the evolution of novel organismal traits.

Reproductive isolation within and between populations was conventionally thought to proceed gradually through many mutations of small phenotypic effect. Contrary to this view, recent theory predicts that large-effect mutations become plausible when populations are far from their phenotypic optimum. Changes in pollinator assemblages severely compromise the reproductive success of many angiosperms, creating conditions conducive to mutations of large phenotypic effects. Here, we explore the role of major-effect genes in the evolutionary shift from hawkmoth to bee pollination in Petunia. By modifying six genes in the ancestral hawkmoth-pollinated P. axillaris phenotype, we created a mimic of the bee-pollinated P. secreta flower that is indistinguishable from this naturally evolved species both in its visual appearance and in behavioral assays. This study uniquely identifies the complete set of genes explaining the shift between two species, providing rare and compelling evidence for speciation by large-effect mutations.

The retina performs visual feature extraction, conveying information to the brain via axonal labeled lines that encode distinct features. A new study reveals surprisingly late developmental plasticity of retinal feature tuning, challenging expectations of stable inputs for visual processing.

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Karst tiankengs-giant enclosed sinkholes-harbor humid, shaded forests that may buffer climate stress yet isolate populations. Here, we generated a near telomere-to-telomere genome assembly for the endangered karst tree Magnolia aromatica and resequenced 26 populations across tiankeng interiors and surrounding habitats in southwest China. Population genomics resolved four lineages and indicated a history of divergence with gene flow constrained by strong dispersal barriers. At the lineage scale, tiankeng-associated populations exhibited intermediate genomic diversity and mutation load relative to non-tiankeng lineages. At fine spatial scales, however, tiankeng-interior populations showed reduced diversity and elevated deleterious burden compared with nearby exterior populations, consistent with demographic isolation and strong genetic drift. We detected lineage-specific selection signals in genes related to photosynthesis and carbon fixation, and shading experiments revealed that seedlings exhibited high mortality under strong light but survived and grew well under deep shade. Forecasts combining species distribution models, genomic offset, and mutation-load prediction identified future risk hotspots near barriers and suggested that genomic erosion may compound climate vulnerability in parts of the range. Together, these results indicate that karst tiankengs can function as nested microrefugia that promote persistence while constraining connectivity and long-term evolutionary potential, with important implications for conserving edaphic specialists under climate change.

Humans recreating in wilderness areas face a risk of encountering and being harmed by fearsome large wild carnivores. Yet, the risk is exceedingly low, because, it turns out, these fearsome predators become quite fearful when encountering humans.

Mu/beta rhythms over sensorimotor cortex reflect motor control dynamics. A new study shows that these rhythms track how the brain prioritizes hand action plans as they shift over time, and that this prioritization is weaker in people who stutter.

Darin Croft introduces the two-way exchange between large land animals that followed the emergence of the Isthmus of Panama around five million years ago.

Habitat transitions are central to microbial ecology and evolution and have been extensively studied across vastly different environments, such as between saline and non-saline environments. However, microbial habitat transitions along other large-scale environmental gradients remain poorly studied. This is particularly true for transitions involving the cryosphere, despite building evidence suggesting the Cryogenian as important for evolutionary radiation. Here, we investigated ecosystem transitions and the related genomic adaptations of the cosmopolitan cryospheric Polaromonas bacterium. We constructed a pangenome from 282 high-quality genomes, sourced from glaciers, glacier-fed streams (GFSs), lakes, wetlands, groundwater, rivers, and soils. Phylogenetic reconciliation suggested that the ancestral Polaromonas genome radiated from glacier ecosystems into various downstream environments through multiple independent transitions. These transitions were likely marked by extensive horizontal gene transfer and gene loss, with mobile genetic elements such as plasmids and prophages playing key roles in genomic diversification. Predicted ancestral genomes encoded versatile metabolic and stress-response capacities, which support adaptation to fluctuating and extreme conditions in the various cryospheric habitats. Compared to the ancestral Polaromonas genome, distinct genomic signatures were associated with specific habitats: GFS lineages possess expanded stress-tolerance repertoires, glacier lineages gained chemolithotrophic and anaerobic pathways, lake and wetland genomes acquired phototrophic functions, and soil lineages expanded substrate transport and stress tolerance. Together, our findings highlight the role of genomic plasticity in the ecological success of Polaromonas and also underscore the cryosphere as a potential evolutionary cradle from which lineages dispersed and adapted to downstream aquatic and terrestrial environments.

The Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) witnessed extensive trans-Eurasian exchange along its northern frontier, yet the social mechanisms mediating this integration within family units remain elusive.1,2 Here, we present genome-wide data from 38 individuals of an elite clan from the Naobaowan cemetery (713-739 CE), located in the agro-pastoral transition zone of Inner Mongolia. Multi-generational pedigree reconstruction using genomic and inscriptional evidence reveals a patrilineal structure defined by Y-haplogroup O2a2b1a1a1a2a, coupled with the systematic practice of female exogamy, whereby women with high West Eurasian steppe ancestry married into the core lineage. These women were buried following local Central Plains brick-chambered tomb customs alongside their husbands and offspring. Tracing these transethnic unions across the pedigree highlights a shift in marriage strategy, as subsequent generations of admixed male descendants consistently married local East Asian women. While patrilineal principles shaped the clan's social organization, the inclusion of a son-in-law (Zhang Jun) in a prominent tomb illustrates flexibility in elite marriage alliances. Our findings demonstrate how a predominantly patrilineal kinship system strategically employed female exogamy and marital flexibility, providing a family-level perspective on genetic exchange and cultural interaction on the Tang frontier.