Rodents are mammals of the order Rodentia, characterized primarily by a single pair of ever-growing incisors in each of the upper and lower jaws, separated from the cheek teeth by a diastema and adapted for gnawing. This order encompasses extensive taxonomic diversity, including families such as Muridae, Cricetidae, Sciuridae, and Caviidae, occupying a wide range of terrestrial and arboreal habitats. Rodents exhibit high reproductive rates, diverse dietary strategies (from herbivory to omnivory), and complex social structures in some lineages. They play key ecological roles as primary consumers, seed predators and dispersers, and prey species, and serve as important model organisms in biomedical and evolutionary research.
Researchers at Stanford Medicine have developed two new artificial intelligence models of the biological cell. The first, called universal cell embedding, paved the way for a second-generation model called TranscriptFormer, ...
Cell & Microbiology
Sep 14, 2026
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39
Laboratory animals are anesthetized to avoid pain during invasive procedures. Anesthesia is necessary for these animals' welfare, but it is not always without problems: Substandard anesthesia can cause suffering, distort ...
Veterinary medicine
Sep 14, 2026
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14
Much like a courier reading an address on a package, neurons must deliver RNA to the precise locations where it is needed. A KAIST research team has discovered how a small chemical modification on RNA acts as a "delivery ...
Cell & Microbiology
Sep 14, 2026
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9
About 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian Period, a large proportion of species on Earth rapidly became extinct. After this mass extinction, many groups of organisms began to recover, while reptiles known as ...
More than two decades after scientists first sequenced the entire human genome—all 3 billion base pairs, of DNA code—the meaning of much of this code remains a mystery.
Evolution
Sep 9, 2026
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76
Most of the countryside around the Holnicote estate in Somerset has been dry and dusty for most of the summer. But one corner remains conspicuously green.
Ecology
Sep 7, 2026
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22
Here's a novel idea for countering the painful side effects of chemotherapy: Beforehand, take the hallucinogenic drug found in magic mushrooms.
Molecular & Computational biology
Sep 5, 2026
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22
For most mammals, cold suppresses neural activity and diminishes the sense of touch. But the thirteen-lined ground squirrel can detect touch in conditions as low as 4°C (39°F), about as cold as the inside of a refrigerator, ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 4, 2026
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11
For decades, scientists have understood that each of the roughly 20,000 genes in the human body carries instructions for a single kind of protein. Now, researchers at Harvard Medical School have discovered that instructions ...
Biotechnology
Sep 2, 2026
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233
The Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) tropical forests stretch across an extraordinary landscape of rivers, wetlands, savannas and towering trees. But in a forest this vast, biodiversity doesn't exist on a single plane. ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 1, 2026
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