Background Patients receiving maintenance hemodialysis (MHD) who develop pneumonia experience substantially elevated risks of hospitalization and mortality, while also incurring significantly heightened healthcare-related financial burdens. Our goal is to establish a forecasting model to assess the individual risk of pneumonia in patients undergoing MHD. Materials and Methods A retrospective analysis was carried out between January 2018 and November 2024, involving 405 MHD patients from two medical centers. The variables underwent adjustment through multivariate Cox regression analysis, and the forecasting model was created and verified. Results The median follow-up time of the external validation set was 35 months (interquartile range: 20–43), and the median follow-up time of the modeling set was 22 months (12–24). The event happened in 101 (34.83%) out of 290 patients in the modeling set and 45 (39.13%) out of 115 patients in the external validation set. The model predictors included history of diabetes and coronary heart disease; serous effusion; white blood cell; albumin-globulin ratio; left ventricular mass index, and age. The C-index was 0.753 (0.684, 0.822) for the external validation set and 0.772 (95% CI [0.724–0.821]) for the modeling set. The model showed excellent calibration ability throughout the risk spectrum, and decision curve analysis showed that it could maximize the prognosis of patients. Conclusion The created predictive model provided a precise, individualized evaluation of pneumonia risk in patients with MHD. It can be used to identify individuals at high risk of pulmonary infection in patients undergoing MHD and guide their treatment and prognosis follow-up.

Ongoing climate change mandates improved understanding of how temperature fluctuations influence organismal evolution and behavior. Detritus-based nest-retreats in spiders have originated multiple times in parallel-hypothesized to be an adaptive response to climatic fluctuations. We investigated the potential role of climate change in shaping the evolution of nest-retreats over geological timescales, and the short-term effect of temperature on the morphology and energy investment of nest-retreat...

Publication date: November 2025 Source: Animal Behaviour, Volume 229 Author(s): Leonardo Campana, Carlos Antônio Mendes Cardoso Júnior, Anete Pedro Lourenço, Klaus Hartfelder

This study examined how perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) relate to technostress in healthcare professionals, testing whether AI acceptance mediates this relationship and whether self-efficacy moderates the formation of acceptance. Seventy-one participants completed measures of Perceptions of AI (Shinners), AI Acceptance (UTAUT), Self-Efficacy, and four technostress outcomes: Technostress Overall, Techno-Overload, Techno-Complexity/Insecurity, and Techno-Uncertainty. Conditional process analyses (PROCESS Model 7; 5000 bootstrap samples) were performed controlling for sex, age (years), and professional role (radiology residents, attending radiologists, PhD researchers). Perceptions of AI were directly and positively associated with Technostress Overall (b = 0.57, p = 0.003), Techno-Overload (b = 0.58, p = 0.008), and Techno-Complexity/Insecurity (b = 0.83, p < 0.001), but not with Techno-Uncertainty (b = −0.02, p = 0.930). AI Acceptance negatively predicted the same three outcomes (e.g., Technostress Overall b = −0.55, p = 0.004), and conditional indirect effects indicated significant negative mediation at low, mean, and high self-efficacy for these three outcomes. Self-efficacy moderated the Perceptions → Acceptance path (interaction b = −0.165, p = 0.028), with a stronger X→M effect at lower self-efficacy, but indices of moderated mediation were not significant for any outcome. The results suggest that perceptions of AI exert both demand-like direct effects and buffering indirect effects via acceptance; implementation should therefore foster acceptance, build competence, and address workload and organizational clarity.

Nature, Published online: 08 October 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09521-xSex bias and association with smoking history identified in the landscape of driver mutations and clonal expansions in normal human bladder tissue may explain the higher bladder cancer risk in men and smokers.

Abstract Parental care has evolved multiple times in the animal kingdom and includes all parental traits that enhance offspring fitness. The evolution of care can lead to prolonged associations between parents and their offspring. This, in turn, can drive parent–offspring coevolution, creating systems in which multiple care behaviors are exhibited and potentially resulting in offspring becoming more dependent on parental care. Parental care often takes indirect forms, such as nest building, while direct care behaviors, like feeding, which involve physical interaction with offspring, are generally less frequent. However, in species where both types of care occur, the extent to which offspring rely on indirect versus direct care is often unknown. In this study, we investigated the roles and relative importance of direct and indirect care in a system where offspring are highly dependent on parental care. We conducted an experiment in which we manipulated the duration and composition of direct and indirect post-hatching care in the burying beetle Nicrophorus orbicollis. Burying beetles reproduce by exploiting small vertebrate carcasses, which they bury and convert into a nutritious nursery for their offspring. In addition to modifying the food resource, parents actively feed their offspring. We found that direct care had a greater effect on offspring growth and survival than indirect care, although indirect care also enhanced fitness. The greater reliance on feeding over indirect care is likely the result of sibling competition for food. Our study underscores the complexity and multi-layered nature of parental care strategies and their effects on offspring performance. Significance Statement Parental care enhances offspring fitness and can include both indirect care, like nest building, and direct care, like feeding. In systems where both care types occur, it is often unclear how much offspring rely on each type. As a model, we used Nicrophorus orbicollis burying beetles, which prepare a carcass as a nursery and regurgitate food to their offspring, to experimentally manipulate the duration and composition of direct and indirect care and assess their relative contributions to offspring survival and growth in this species. Our results show that while direct care has a stronger effect on offspring survival and growth, indirect care also provides measurable benefits. This study highlights the adaptive value of multi-component parental care strategies and the complex interactions between parents and offspring in species that depend heavily on parental care.

Ecology and Evolution, Volume 15, Issue 10, October 2025.

Fugazza et al. show that Gifted Word Learner dogs extend verbal labels to functionally similar objects, even without perceptual similarity, during playful interactions with their human families. Functional classification linked to vocabulary learning in a naturalistic context offers new insights into language evolution and its links to other cognitive abilities.

Brain and Behavior, Volume 15, Issue 10, October 2025.

Background: In 2023, the World Health Organization declared that there is no safe amount of alcohol consumption. It is becoming increasingly clear that even at lower doses, ethanol exposure impacts both the brain and behavior. Emerging work has shown that chronic exposure to lower doses of ethanol may lead to inflexible behaviors and promote aberrant reward seeking. This study aimed to determine the impact of chronic, low-dose ethanol exposure on neural substrates of reward and associated alterations in behavioral strategy in response to change in reward value. Methods: Female and male C57BL/6J mice underwent operant training to self-administer 10% sucrose under a fixed ratio schedule. Once mice showed stable responding, response criteria were graduated to a random interval schedule to promote automated behaviors. Throughout training, mice were given an i.p. injection of low-dose ethanol (0.5g/kg) or saline, 1 hour after each training session. Mice did not receive low-dose ethanol or saline i.p. injections after completion of training. Mice were then tested in PR task in which the reward magnitude of reinforcer was reduced (small or large) or increased (small or large). A subset of mice expressed a retrograde tracer in the nucleus accumbens (NAc), and cFos expression within NAc circuits was analyzed following a sucrose self-administration session. Results: Chronic low-dose ethanol exposure altered behavioral responding in female mice following small changes in reward magnitude. Female mice showed divergent response patterns when there was a small reduction in reward magnitude, with greater proportions of ethanol-exposed female mice either increasing or decreasing responding versus controls. Following a small increase, low-dose ethanol female mice significantly increased responding versus controls. Female mice exposed to chronic low-dose ethanol shifted behavioral strategy with a reduction in "checking" behavior (magazine entry after a lever press) in response to changes in reward magnitude. This effect was not observed in male mice. Low-dose ethanol altered cFos expression within the prelimbic cortex and its projections to the NAc during reward seeking. Conclusions: Chronic, low-dose ethanol altered behavioral responding and strategy in female mice in response to changes in reward value. During reward seeking, low-dose ethanol exposure impacted prelimbic cortex and its projections to the nucleus accumbens activity in both female and male mice. Future studies should investigate the consequences of chronic low-dose ethanol on both the brain and behavior to further understand what underlying processes drive aberrant reward-seeking behaviors.

Previous work has argued that the ability to sustain attention consistency can be best modeled as the individual-difference covariation in objective performance-based measures (e.g., reaction-time [RT] variability; accuracy) and self-report measures of task-unrelated thought (TUT). Latent variable studies demonstrate that a general, higher-order attention consistency factor correlates more strongly with nomological network constructs than do either lower-order, measurement-specific factors. The present study aimed to replicate and extend this measurement approach by building a construct-valid battery of sustained attention consistency tasks and testing associations with the conative factors of task interest and success motivation. We analyzed data from 402 subjects who completed a battery of seven attention-consistency functions and found that the hierarchical model provided an adequate fit to the data. Further, attention-consistency associations with motivation and interest, while evident with the lower-order factors, were again stronger with the general higher-order factor (and each conative factor predicted unique variance in general attention consistency in structural regression models). We also refined our task battery by removing poor-performing indicators and demonstrated similar patterns of correlations among the attention and conative factors. We suggest that studies examining attention consistency should use a combination of performance and self-report indicators to capture its individual-differences variation in the most construct valid way. We finally provide recommendations on which tasks and measures might be most useful when measuring sustained attention consistency in future research.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 122, Issue 40, October 2025. SignificanceAnimals’ space-use patterns are central to eco-evolutionary theories of territoriality and foraging and to resource management practices, all of which can entail assumptions of spatial homogeneity. We found evidence for species- and clade-...

by Marco A. Coelho, Márcia David-Palma, Seonju Marincowitz, Janneke Aylward, Nam Q. Pham, Andrey M. Yurkov, Brenda D. Wingfield, Michael J. Wingfield, Sheng Sun, Joseph Heitman Sexual reproduction in basidiomycete fungi is governed by MAT loci (P/R and HD), which exhibit remarkable evolutionary plasticity, characterized by expansions, rearrangements, and gene losses often associated with mating system transitions. The sister genera Cryptococcus and Kwoniella provide a powerful framework for studying MAT loci evolution owing to their diverse reproductive strategies and distinct architectures, spanning bipolar and tetrapolar systems with either linked or unlinked MAT loci. Building on recent comparative genomic analyses, we generated additional chromosome-level assemblies, uncovering distinct trajectories shaping MAT loci organization. Contrasting with the small-scale expansions and gene acquisitions observed in Kwoniella, our analyses revealed independent expansions of the P/R locus in tetrapolar Cryptococcus, possibly driven by pheromone gene duplications. Notably, these expansions coincided with a pronounced GC-content reduction best explained by reduced GC-biased gene conversion following recombination suppression, rather than relaxed codon usage selection. Diverse modes of MAT locus linkage were also identified, including three previously unrecognized transitions: one resulting in a pseudobipolar arrangement and two leading to bipolarity. All three transitions involved translocations. In the pseudobipolar configuration, the P/R and HD loci remained on the same chromosome but genetically unlinked, whereas the bipolar transitions additionally featured rearrangements that fused the two loci into a nonrecombining region. Mating assays confirmed a sexual cycle in Cryptococcus decagattii, demonstrating its ability to undergo mating and sporulation. Progeny analysis in Kwoniella mangrovensis revealed substantial ploidy variation and aneuploidy, likely stemming from haploid–diploid mating, yet evidence of recombination and loss of heterozygosity indicates that meiotic exchange occurs despite irregular chromosome segregation. Our findings underscore the importance of continued diversity sampling and provide further evidence for convergent evolution of fused MAT loci in basidiomycetes, offering new insights into the genetic and chromosomal changes driving reproductive transitions.

Stingless bees belong to the group of corbiculate bees, all characterized by the presence of a corbicula, a specialized structure of the hind tibia used for pollen collection. This group exhibits significant variation in foraging behavior, from flower-visiting foragers to kleptoparasites and obligate necrophagous. So far, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) studies have been mainly focused on the hind leg setae of Apis spp. and Bombus spp. Here, we performed a comparative morphological analysis of the setae and the pollen handling structures in the hind tibiae and basitarsi of seven stingless bee species: the floral pollen collector bees Melipona cf. eburnea, Partamona testacea, Scaura cf. latitarsis, Trigonisca cf. atomaria, Trigona dallatorreana, the robber bee Lestrimelitta sp. and the obligate necrophagous Trigona cf. hypogea, collected in Peruvian forests in 2020. The setae were classified into simple and branched types, subdivided into five and seven subtypes, respectively. In addition, we described three types of penicillum, five types of rastellum, three types of pollen brush, two types of setae covering the auricular area, and show the setae forming the sericeous area of Trigona spp. Finally, seven types of keirotrichia are described. We highlight that certain types of setae show a high degree of conservation across species, while others are unique and potentially indicative of adaptive specialization. Among species that have abandoned pollen foraging on flowers, we observed a simplification in the number of setal types and the absence of pollen handling structures in Lestrimelitta sp., whereas T. cf. hypogea exhibits the highest diversity of setae and retains most of these structures. Finally, based on these two species, we reflect on the link between reduced corbicula and functional corbicula. The study highlights the importance of further exploring the mechanical and sensory roles of setae and expanding this research in Meliponini. Such investigations can improve our understanding of their adaptive functions and provide valuable insights into the functional ecology, taxonomy and phylogenetic studies of these tropical pollinators.

The reactivity of wild animals has been studied due to its influence on ex-situ management and conservation strategies. However, there is insufficient research examining the impact of reactivity on training processes for veterinary handling procedures, which are essential for promoting the welfare of wild animals in conservation centers, zoos, and research institutions. This study aimed to evaluate the influence of reactivity on training for veterinary procedures in red brocket deer (Mazama...

Nature, Published online: 08 October 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-09604-9Using a new analytical method for tracking gamma band events in mouse visual cortex, flexible encoding of visual information according to behavioural context is shown.

Perrier et al. show that wild African striped mice (R. pumilio) use short-range ultrasonic signals for large-scale communication. By vocalizing at key territorial locations, they extend the functional reach of these private signals, broadcasting group identity to differentiate between groupmates, neighbors, and strangers, mediating complex territorial dynamics.

Chen et al. identify IFT88 as the primary adaptor linking the heterotrimeric kinesin-II motor to the intraflagellar transport (IFT) complex. Structural and functional analyses reveal conserved electrostatic interfaces between IFT88 and kinesin-II’s KAP subunit essential for motor engagement and anterograde ciliary transport.

Collective animal behaviour research to date typically specifies members of the group as identical individuals, even though within group heterogeneity is commonplace. We exploit the tractable C. elegans study system to explicitly define and manipulate heterogeneity to investigate how individuals with different behavioural phenotypes interact and aggregate in heterogeneous group settings. Using controlled mixing experiments between pairs of strains that have defined aggregation tendencies, we apply a quantitative behavioural analysis framework and show that individuals maintain their intrinsic movement patterns and interaction rules regardless of group composition. Notably, neither behavioural differences nor distant genetic relatedness between strains lead to a modulation of individual behaviour; instead, distinct strains behave and coexist without influencing each other's intrinsic behavioural tendencies. Using a simulation model, we further show that aggregation in mixed C. elegans groups can be accurately predicted from strain-specific individual-level parameters measured in homogeneous settings. Our integrated approach provides a generalised framework for understanding collective behaviour in diverse heterogeneous systems, which may offer insights into population-level consequences of phenotypic variation and broader ecological processes.

Species that have complex courtship behaviors are some of the most evolutionarily diverse lineages observed in nature. Divergent, pre-mating calls are effective in both generating and maintaining reproductive isolation. Complex courtship displays provide numerous traits in which a small change can reinforce or lead to reproductive isolation. Display traits often evolve interactively, multiplicatively increasing the potential phenotype variants. Because many traits can be quantified and used to...

In group-living animals, open wounds pose a risk not only for the injured individual but also for the entire group, especially when the risk of infection transmission is high. To mitigate this danger, different species have developed diverse strategies - with ants representing one of the few taxa beyond humans that engage in social wound care. Yet, who provides this care and what determines its allocation remains unclear. To answer these questions, we combined controlled injury experiments with automated behavioral tracking across six colonies of the ant Camponotus fellah. Our results reveal that wound care is primarily provided by a non-specialized subset of individuals whose behavioral traits align with a transitional phase between the nurse and forager roles. Among these transitioning ants, care provision was best predicted by their prior spatial and social proximity to the injured individuals in the hours before the injury, indicating that pre-existing social affinity influences caregiving behavior. These findings offer the first empirical evidence of how caregivers are integrated into the colony's social structure and highlight the role of social interactions in shaping the organization of wound care in ants.

Evidence from the international literature indicates alarming prevalence rates associated with various forms of intimate partner violence since adolescence. To prevent gender-based violence and increase psychological well-being in intimate relationships, both the scientific literature and policy makers agree on the importance of implementing specific prevention and education programs targeting adolescents. The purpose of this longitudinal study was to evaluate the impact of an educational intervention to promote awareness of one’s relationship with one’s own body, stereotypes related to gender and sexuality, and the issue of sexual consent. Participants were adolescents aged 15–16 years who filled a questionnaire prior to the start of the intervention (Time 0, N = 192, 55.7% male) and two weeks following its conclusion (Time 1, N = 178, 53.9% male). Results indicate that compared to Time 0, after participation, body surveillance, benevolent sexism, and endorsement of the sexual double standard decreased, while no significant effect emerged in relation to the issue of sexual consent. Implications for research and intervention are discussed, with the goal of providing useful guidance for those implementing interventions for young people to address intimate partner violence and promote relationship well-being.

Nature, Published online: 08 October 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-03238-7Close cooperation in flight between vertically stacked multirotor drones is widely regarded as dangerous, because there is persistent and intense ‘downwash’ interference. A ‘flying toolbox’ has been developed that achieves high-accuracy docking despite the downwash, enabling mid-air tool exchanges and unlocking diverse aerial manipulation tasks.

While many animals use social information to discover novel food sources, the importance of social information availability in the process of learning and remembering specific, fine-scale resource locations remains unclear. Benefits of using social information may vary with an individual’s ability to learn and remember resource locations and environmental conditions. We experimentally tested whether animals use social information from group mates to find and learn resource locations using wild, food-caching mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli). We tested spatial learning and memory performance by tasking birds with learning the location of one rewarding feeder out of eight using two treatments: (1) birds in the same social group shared the same feeder and (2) social group members had to learn different feeders. We found no evidence that access to social information from close social associates facilitates spatial learning and memory as there were no differences in performance between treatments. Most chickadees used personal information to find their feeder, but there were low and similar rates of social information transmission for both treatments. Our results suggest that chickadees use social information from conspecifics regardless of group membership or familiarity but primarily rely on independent learning and personal information when foraging in a familiar area.

Moll et al. show that carrion crows—which do not habitually use tools in the wild—can be trained to use a stick tool as an extension of their body. Trained crows flexibly adjust tool orientation and dexterously correct errors when the tool’s working end loses control over the target.