It may sound batty, but University of Georgia researchers have confirmed that North American bats glow under ultraviolet light.

The National Academy of Medicine announced the election of Karel Svoboda, Ph.D., executive vice president and director of Allen Institute’s Neural Dynamics moonshot, and Jay Shendure, M.D./Ph.D., lead scientific director of the collaborative Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology and professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Election to the Academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes leaders who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and made lasting contributions to the advancement of the medical sciences, health care, and public health.

Environmental DNA sequences from soil and aquatic habitats yielded 30 novel fungal lineages, formally classified from species to phylum and subkingdom levels. The taxa were named according to type locality using latinized native languages. This approach of using material samples as types and DNA characters as diagnostic markers offers a valuable tool for describing the unseen microbial diversity, further improving their taxonomic communication and formal treatment in, for example, conservation and quarantine assessments.