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Machine-learning-based prediction of splicing in extinct hominin species highlights the effect of natural selection on splice-altering variants and reveals phenotypic differences with modern humans.
The late Middle Pleistocene site of Bargny, Senegal, documents stone tool trends seen across contemporary sites in Africa but which, in West Africa, remain uniquely stable into the Holocene. Palaeoenvironmental data suggest that persistently stable environments in West Africa through the Late Pleistocene, including estuarine refugia, may have supported consistent behavioural responses.
The authors use machine learning to characterize the splicing landscape of archaic hominins. Archaic-specific splice-altering variants might have contributed to phenotypic differences among hominins and were under negative selection.
Organisms living at high elevations are particularly vulnerable to climate warming. Here the authors combine hydrological and glacier modelling with species distribution models to show how glacier retreat in the European Alps could impact the biodiversity and distributions of invertebrates in alpine rivers.
Efforts to document biodiversity have created large species datasets, but new research shows that field observations are biased towards particular regions, clades, traits and time periods, and do not accurately represent global biodiversity patterns. Although specimens are only infrequently preserved in natural history collections, they show relative congruence with expected biodiversity patterns and are vital for ecological research.
An interrogation of almost 2 billion occurrence records for terrestrial plants and animals derived from either primary voucher specimens or direct observations, including citizen-science data, reveals differences in their coverage of global biodiversity patterns.
The authors report a highly diverse Middle Ordovician Burgess Shale-type fauna from Wales (UK) that compares with the Burgess Shale and Chengjiang biotas in palaeoenvironment and preservational style.
Shifts in species’ migration timing as a result of climate change can result in mismatched temporal overlap with their critical resources. Here the authors show that the magnitude and direction of shifts in juvenile Pacific salmon migration timing vary among species and populations, resulting in variable mismatch with marine productivity, which has implications for climate change vulnerability.
Using avian trait data and genomic data, the authors infer whether changes in net effective population size over time in response to climate change are correlated with multiple morphological and life history traits; they find that larger-bodied, slower-reproducing species with limited dispersal capacity are most sensitive to changes in warming and cooling climates.
Most comparative animal cognition studies assume that results are stable in individuals and groups, but this is not often tested. Here the authors assess repeatability of cognitive tasks in several species of captive great apes, finding that individual performance over time is stable and predicted by fixed differences among individuals rather than transient experimental conditions.
Using data from the BEF-China tree diversity experiment, the authors demonstrate that the diversity of arthropods is higher in plots with higher tree diversity and that the suppression of herbivores by enemy arthropods could be a potential mechanism through which higher tree diversity promotes productivity.
Chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, are ready to speed up monotonous coding tasks and teach you new skills. We highlight, with worked examples, some advantages and limitations of using generative artificial intelligence for scientific coding and argue that if you are willing to debug, you can get a head start on more challenging tasks.
This study shows that environmental conditions promote multicellular group formation in green algae and that retention of daughter cells reliant on nitrogen availability promotes fitness in the lab and in natural lake systems in Sweden.
A visionary conservationist, deep thinker and versatile scholar who challenged the field of conservation to reflect on itself and its purpose in inclusive ways.
Analysing plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the authors identify three times more coastal invertebrate taxa than pelagic taxa, along with evidence that coastal taxa are reproducing while rafting on plastic.
In microbial community assembly, species that establish earlier often have an advantage. Here, the authors explore these priority effects in the tomato plant-associated microbiome, showing that experimental evolution selecting for host colonization alters priority effects among competitors.