It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, October 08, 2026
1 in 20 pet cats in North America might have Giardia infection, with young, male, unneutered cats especially at risk, per analysis of more than 150,000 feline stool samples
Credit: Wingerd et al., 2026, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
1 in 20 pet cats in North America might have Giardia infection, with young, male, unneutered cats especially at risk, per analysis of more than 150,000 feline stool samples
Credit: Faith M. Walker, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Understanding changes in North American bat populations is critical to measuring risk of extinction from emerging threats such as habitat loss, climate change, white nose syndrome and other disturbances. A study published October 7, 2026, in the open access journal PLOS One by Faith M. Walker at Northern Arizona University, USA, and colleagues describes an innovative research design involving the genetic analysis of ancient, modern, and contemporary biological samples from North American spotted bats.
Globally, bats comprise one-fifth of mammalian diversity, but their elusive behavior can hinder scientific observation. For example, spotted bats (Euderma maculatum) are nocturnal, agile fliers who roost solitarily. In order to better understand spotted bats’ population genetic diversity and structure, researchers obtained samples from 121 individual bats from across three separate timeframes across the species range in western North America. These samples included live, captured bats, historical specimens from museum collections collected between 1904 and 1991, contemporary specimens collected between 1994 and 2025, and ancient remains recovered from a northern Arizona cave, radiocarbon dated to 120–2,100 years before present (BP).
The researchers were able to describe the genetic structure, genetic variation and genetic relatedness of spotted bats and identify genetic differences between the northern and southern populations. The study had a few limitations, such as a sample bias – many of the modern specimens originated from a single cave. Future studies are needed to better understand the impacts of specific anthropogenic disturbances on population dispersal and dynamics.
According to the authors, “Our integrative approach across temporal scales highlights the conservation importance of preserving genetically diverse core populations, vulnerable leading-edge populations, and isolated relict lineages. Further knowledge of population structure and genetic diversity across the species’ range will promote conservation and management actions for spotted bats”.
Faith M. Walker adds: “One of the most important findings of our study is that spotted bats in the southwestern United States harbor the greatest genetic diversity across the species' range, making this region a critical reservoir of evolutionary potential for the species. In contrast, northern populations appear to have lower genetic diversity and may be more vulnerable to future environmental change.”
“Rare and elusive species like the spotted bat can be extremely difficult to study using conventional methods. Genetics allows us to see patterns of connectivity, isolation, and long-term persistence that would otherwise remain hidden, providing information that can directly inform conservation planning.”
"One of the most rewarding aspects of this project was bringing together samples collected over more than a century, from museum specimens and ancient cave remains to bats captured in the field today. Each sample represented a small piece of the species' history, and together they allowed us to reconstruct a much broader picture of how spotted bat populations have changed through time."
"Spotted bats are among North America's most mysterious mammals. By combining DNA from ancient, historical, and modern specimens, we were able to trace their evolutionary history across space and time and identify the populations that may be most important to conserve for the future."
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/4718NKd
Citation: Walker FM, Sanchez DE, Campana MG, Fleischer RC, Foster JT, Sobek CJ, et al. (2026) Conservation genetics of the spotted bat: Insights from ancient, historical, and modern samples. PLoS One 21(10): e0358330. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0358330
Author countries: USA.
Funding: Funding was provided by the State of Arizona Technology and Research Initiative Fund.
Illustration of uintatheres that scientists thought were a prime illustration of sexual dimorphism, or the tendency for males and females of a species to be physically different. Instead, a new study from the University of Kansas shows nuance between males and females.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons Charles Robert Knight https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eobasileus.jpg
LAWRENCE — For decades, paleontologists have held up uintatheres as a prime illustration of sexual dimorphism, or the tendency for males and females of a species to be physically different.
Notable for their large size, prominent horns and canine teeth, uintatheres emerged about 58 million years ago, fewer than 10 million years after a space rock killed the dinosaurs, and show up in the fossil record for the next 20 million years or so.
“Males have been interpreted as being much larger and possessing far more dramatic cranial features than females,” said study author Kevin Mulcahy, doctoral student at the KU Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum.
Mulcahy and his doctoral adviser, K. Christopher Beard, senior curator at the institute, were trying to identify a single broken upper molar from fieldwork in Montana that the researchers suspected could have belonged to the uintathere group.
“We had a research visit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where our main goal was just to compare that tooth to teeth from other uintatheres and figure out what type of animal we had,” Mulcahy said. “They have this big collection — entire shelves occupied with these skulls, and each one of them is almost a meter long. These are famous specimens that are in the literature, and I was originally just looking at them to compare their teeth, and I noticed a ton of variation in a way that didn’t appear binary.”
The KU scholar began recording dimensions of the skulls at the AMNH.
“I just, really hastily, with a ruler, gathered a bunch of measurements of the skulls while we were there,” Mulcahy said. “I started playing around with statistics, and there are ways you can look at different measurements to see if they’re best fit by a classic unimodal distribution, or if you were to think you’re dealing with something that exhibits strong sexual dimorphism, you’d see something with a bimodal distribution — that there are two means, one for males and one for females.”
However, after analysis, the KU researcher wasn’t seeing that distribution in the traits he’d measured in New York.
“It wasn’t like there’s one group of specimens that look bigger than another, and then there’s another group that are smaller with smaller horns and canines,” he said. “So I was kind of interested — are these really good examples of sexual dimorphism after all? Is there actual evidence in the morphology of these skulls, in the distribution in particular of the ranges of morphology we’re seeing, that that’s what’s going on?”
Mulcahy branched out, gathered more measurements from specimens at other institutions, and used new statistical procedures. In the end, his dataset included about 30 skulls of one extinct species, Uintatherium anceps.
“Maybe there were some little signals of dimorphism here and there, but nothing really concrete,” he said. “I had an idea: Maybe it’s just that the techniques I’m using aren’t robust enough to actually measure sexual dimorphism. With fossil animals, you don’t actually know which specimens are males and which are females. You can guess and then test whether or not the ones you guess are males differ from the ones you guess are females, but that’s super circular, because you could just be picking the most extreme ones to be one sex and the least extreme to be the other. Of course they’re going to differ.”
So, the KU researcher decided to use the same statistical techniques he was using on uintatheres on modern-day bison, as he could be sure of the sex of each specimen.
“When you’re dealing with living animals, you can just take the males, take the females and compare them,” he said. “Bison are another really big herbivore, with a similar sort of ecology that’s been proposed for uintatheres, and they also have big horns. What I noticed is that the signals of dimorphism I was picking up in bison were a lot clearer. When I was looking at the bison, it was almost perfect that all of the females were most similar to the females, and all the males were most similar to the males.”
Mulcahy said mistaken assumptions about sexual dimorphism could have roots in the cultural biases of the late 19th and early 20th century, when so many fossil species were first described.
“Back then, this is right when evolutionary theory, sexual selection, natural selection, all of that is kind of coming into play,” he said. “I think it’s really important to remember that these things were first discovered in the late 1800s by a bunch of male paleontologists working in a very Victorian-era mindset. The idea is basically assumed at that point that males are going to be bigger and scarier than females. It’s really interesting: When you step back and actually test that hypothesis, it doesn’t really hold up.”
The KU researcher said a weak signal for dimorphism in uintatheres, long a flagship for dimorphism, suggests other species in the fossil record might also be less dimorphic than paleontologists have held.
“Strong, big male-style sexual dimorphism was probably not ancestral at the root of the mammalian tree, and among the mammals where we do see this pattern today, it’s almost certainly shown up independently several times,” Mulcahy said. “It had long been assumed that sexual dimorphism is the norm, that most species show that males are bigger than females. But just a couple years ago, a paper came out showing that among living mammals, most species either don’t show any dimorphism or actually have larger females. The idea that males are always bigger than females is really just a choice of what animals were people looking at, what are the things that biologists in the past were interested in.”
Wikimedia Commons Marsh, Othniel Charles https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dinocerata_(Pl._LV)_(7159108236).jpg
Working around men may make women feel worse about mistakes, study finds
With more men on the team, it may become harder for women to admit mistakes or see them as learning opportunities, shows study of workplaces with ‘harsh error culture’
We all make them, and we all make them at work: mistakes on the job happen regardless of line of work, experience, and gender. How employees feel about them and how they are perceived by others, however, differs. Between men and women, the latter are more likely to perceive mistakes more negatively – but this depends on with whom they are sharing the office, a new Frontiers in Organizational Psychology study has shown.
“On paper, a mistake carries the same consequences whoever makes it, and that is exactly what we found. But formal rules aren’t culture,” said lead author Dr Grace Lordan at the London School of Economics. “In teams that are three-quarters or more male, women told us they feel less comfortable admitting a mistake and less confident it will be treated as something to learn from. Where women are in the majority, that gap vanishes.”
Women at work
For their study, the team surveyed how comfortable employees would be admitting mistakes, how likely they are to believe they’d be penalized for making them, and whether they’d consider them as a learning opportunity. Over 1,400 employees in the UK financial service sector participated. While this sector is male dominated, the study population was made up of 81% women.
The results showed two consistent patterns: being a woman and being in a male-dominated work setting was associated with seeing mistakes more negatively; the latter pattern was regardless of gender.
“Extremely male-heavy, high-pressure teams may foster a general climate of fear or perfectionism and a ‘no mistakes’ norm,” said Lordan.
Further, men reported more positive views of mistakes across all measurements than women, who felt less comfortable admitting mistakes, were more likely to think they’d be punished for them and were less inclined to consider them learning opportunities. In more male-dominated workplaces, these trends sharpened further.
“In teams where more than three quarters were men, women report less comfort: 5.46 vs 5.94 for men in the same settings on a seven-point scale. Women were also less likely to see mistakes as learning opportunities (4.20 vs 4.54),” Lordan pointed out. “In low-male-share environments, women’s views are as positive as men’s or slightly better.”
Men’s perception, on the other hand, varied very little depending on their workplace’s gender composition.
Err to learn
The one score where the team did not find a gender difference was the expectation of penalization. In comparable roles and settings, women didn’t expect to be punished more than men, neither in female- nor in male-heavy places of work. This could be due to how respondents interpreted the term ‘penalization,’ which might have evoked formal consequences, for example, a note on the record or a career setback.
Fear of indirect penalties, however, might be more widespread among women, said the team.
“Comfort and learning tap informal, cultural dimensions, which is where bias tends to show up: being seen as less competent, having the mistake held against you in unwritten ways,” said Lordan. “Women may feel on ‘thinner ice’ psychologically even with the same consequences on paper.”
The authors pointed out that this might not only affect employees and teams but may also have negative repercussions throughout companies.
“Learning from failure is where innovation comes from. If women feel less free to admit mistakes, the organization doesn’t just lose their confidence; it loses the lessons,” said Lordan. “The fix isn’t expensive. Leaders, and especially men leading male-heavy teams, can change the climate simply by being open about their own mistakes.”
The authors also suggest peer groups for women, in- and outside of immediate teams, that offer safe spaces to discuss mistakes. Excessive double-checking or avoiding ‘risky’ projects, however, can stunt career growth.
Because of the gender-unbalanced sample, the authors said that their results cannot be readily generalized. The findings mostly apply to high-pressure, low-tolerance fields, but may extend to tech, engineering, and some medical specialties, other research suggests. The data was also based on self-reports about a hypothetical scenario that might have been imagined differently by every participant.
“Over time, freedom to fail could contribute to gaps in expertise, confidence and advancement, caused by unequal opportunity to learn, not ability,” concluded Lordan. “A more inclusive error culture benefits everyone.”
The future benefits expected of remote monitoring in healthcare are shaped by how professionals understand their current work and its associated challenges, a recent study from the University of Eastern Finland shows.
Researchers interviewed healthcare professionals involved in a remote-monitoiring pilot for older patients with neurological conditions. The study examined home-based digital monitoring as a new way of organising care, with nurses’ day-to-day work playing a central role during the pilot phase, when remote monitoring was still being tested.
Nurses described remote monitoring as involving a considerable amount of day-to-day work, including advising and encouraging patients, solving technical problems and taking on new monitoring tasks. At the same time, remote monitoring was expected to make future nursing work more efficient and streamlined as technologies develop and practices become established. Patients were seen as needing considerable support in the early phases, while future patients were expected to manage more independently.
A key finding of the study was that experiences of remote monitoring and expectations about its future are closely connected, but not without tensions
“The promises of digital health are not only about the future. They also shape how professionals understand their current work,” says Doctoral Researcher Melika Azim Zadegan of the University of Eastern Finland.
The study highlights that developing digital health services requires more than technological development. Attention must also be paid to how professionals experience changes in working practices and how they envisage the future of remote monitoring in their own work.
“It is important to study digitalisation in healthcare while new ways of working are still being tested. This helps us understand how early experiences and future expectations are connected and what kinds of tensions may emerge between them,” Azim Zadegan says.
The study was conducted within the Neuro-Innovation PhD programme, which is funded by the University of Eastern Finland and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101034307.
