New study sheds light on how insects, spiders, crustaceans, and other arthropods evolved their distinct body structures. By tracing these patterns back to ancient embryonic processes, the research uncovers a deep evolutionary logic behind the segmented body plans that define the world’s most diverse animal group. The findings challenge long-held assumptions and offer a bold new framework for understanding how developmental mechanisms shaped the evolution of arthropods over hundreds of millions of years.

By analyzing DNA from different cells in nearly 200 lines of maize plants, research led by the University of Michigan has revealed insights that could help growers better adapt their crops to a fast-changing environment. 

Researchers led by Keigo Morita and Shinya Kuroda of the University of Tokyo have revealed a temporal disruption in the metabolism of obese mice when adapting to starvation despite no significant structural disruptions in the molecular network. This is a breakthrough discovery as research including the temporal dimension in biology has been notoriously laborious and extracting systematic insight from big data has been difficult. Thus, this study paves the way for further research into more general metabolic processes, such as food intake and disease progression. The findings were published in the journal Science Signaling.

Expecting feedback from an avatar compared to a real human facilitates risk-taking behavior in a gambling task, and a brain region called the amygdala is central to this facilitation, according to a study published April 22^nd in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Toshiko Tanaka and Masahiko Haruno from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan.