Multicellularity is one of the most profound phenomena in biology, and relies on the ability of a single cell to reorganize itself into a complex organism. It underpins the diversity in the animal kingdom, from insects to frogs, to humans. But how do cells establish and maintain their individuality with such precision? A team led by Jan Brugués at the Cluster of Excellence Physics of Life (PoL) at Dresden University of Technology has uncovered fundamental mechanisms that shed light on this question. The findings, now published in the scientific journal Nature, reveal how cells establish physical boundaries through an inherently unstable process, and how different species have evolved distinct strategies to circumvent this process.

While paleontologists have uncovered dozens of such Cambrian soft-bodied fossil sites—including China's early Cambrian Chengjiang biota in Yunnan and Canada's middle Cambrian Burgess Shale biota, the most famous examples of their kind—no equivalent top-tier soft-bodied fossil deposit had ever been found from the critical post-Sinsk Event time interval.

That changed over the past five years, however, with the discovery of the Huayuan biota—a world-class soft-bodied fossil deposit dating to shortly after the Sinsk Event. The deposit, located in Huayuan County, Hunan Province, was identified by a research team from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), whose findings were published in Nature on January 28.

A study led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a joint research center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), has revealed that corals also sleep, despite them not having a nervous system, while their microbiome remains awake.

A newly published perspective in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface argues that advances in AI, sensing technologies and modelling are transforming the study of collective animal behavior, with implications reaching far beyond biology, from robotics to the dynamics of human crowds.