Exeter and Essex researchers report in Nature that butterfly wing patterns in flight create motion illusions, widespread across about 400 European species. The finding is presented as helping explain why so few predators hunt butterflies on the wing, though the tests used bird-vision models and human volunteers.
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Würzburg biologists date New World blackbirds' first move into South America to about 6 million years ago, roughly 3 million years earlier than past estimates. Their model has the family starting in North America and crossing south before the Isthmus of Panama had fully formed.
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TranscriptFormer learned gene expression the way a language model learns text, across 12 species from single-celled yeast to humans. Its cross-species matches arrive as hypotheses a bench experiment still has to test.
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Sticklebacks bred for two generations in identical Bern tanks still did best at the exact stream their grandparents came from. Local adaptation sits at a finer scale than the lake-versus-stream contrast.
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A Current Biology study mapped social behavior onto two large insect phylogenies and found nearly the whole signal comes from the stinging wasps, bees and ants.
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