You can know a lot of things about birds just by the shape of their wings. A seafaring albatross, stretching out its sail-like airfoils, lives a very different life from a ground-dwelling antpitta with its long legs and short, stubby wings that it uses in rare, short bursts of flight.

But can bird wing shape tell scientists something useful about how nature is organized?

Research from Washington University in St. Louis says that bird wing shape—a proxy for long-distance flying ability—is a trait that influences biodiversity patterns on islands around the world.

According to a new study of rivers and lakes in Wisconsin, natural foams from these bodies of water contain much higher concentrations of per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) than the water below them.

Thirty-six different kinds of PFAS compounds were analyzed in samples of both the foams and water surface microlayers of 43 Wisconsin rivers and lakes. The study, which is published in Environmental Science & Technology, also revealed that foams, generally off-white and found along shorelines, are not necessarily an indicator of elevated contamination levels in the entire water body.

“We studied many different lakes and found PFAS in all of them. The PFAS concentrations were high in the foams even if the concentrations in the water were relatively low,” said Christy Remucal, a professor with the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and interim director of the University of Wisconsin Aquatic Sciences Center.

Researchers have described some of the best-preserved three-dimensional trilobite fossils ever discovered. The fossils, which are more than 500 million years old, were collected in the High Atlas of Morocco and are being referred to by scientists as “Pompeii” trilobites due to their remarkable preservation in ash.

The paper, “Rapid volcanic ash entombment reveals the 3D anatomy of Cambrian trilobites,” was published in the journal, Science.

The trilobites, from the Cambrian period, have been the subject of research by an international team of scientists, led by Prof Abderrazak El Albani, a geologist based at University of Poitiers and originally from Morocco. The team included Dr. Greg Edgecombe, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum.

Research in nonhuman primates is opening the possibility of testing treatments for the early stages of Alzheimer’s and similar diseases, before extensive brain cell death and dementia set in. A study published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia shows up to a six-month window in which disease progress could be tracked and treatments tested in rhesus macaques.

While seeking research internships last year, University of Washington graduate student Kate Glazko noticed recruiters posting online that they’d used OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools to summarize resumes and rank candidates. Automated screening has been commonplace in hiring for decades. Yet Glazko, a doctoral student in the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, studies how generative AI can replicate and amplify real-world biases—such as those against disabled people. How might such a system, she wondered, rank resumes that implied someone had a disability?