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The distributions of species radiations reflect environmental changes driven by both Earth history (geological processes) and the evolution of biological traits (critical to survival and adaptation), which profoundly drive biodiversity yet are rarely studied together. Modern toads (Bufonidae, Amphibia), an iconic radiation with global distribution and high phenotypic diversity, are an ideal group for exploring these dynamics. Using phylogenomic data from 124 species across six continents, we reconstruct their evolutionary history. Biogeographic analyses suggest modern toads originated in South America approximately 61 million years ago (Ma), later dispersing to Africa and Asia, thereby challenging hypotheses of dispersal via North America. Species diversification rates increased after leaving South America, linked to Cenozoic geological events and key innovations like toxic parotoid glands for predator defence. The emergence of parotoid glands coincided with the South American dispersal, promoting diversification and enabling toads to dominate both Old and New Worlds. In contrast, the evolution of other traits, despite being crucial to adaptation, did not promote species diversification (e.g. large body size) or were ambiguously associated with expansion into the Old World (e.g. developmental modes). These findings highlight the adaptability of modern toads and reveal the interplay between Earth’s history and phenotypic innovation in shaping biodiversity. 

(1) Background: Nanoplastics are emerging environmental pollutants with potential toxic effects on aquatic organisms. This study investigates the toxicity of NPs in Biomphalaria glabrata, a freshwater snail species widely used as a bioindicator species in ecotoxicology studies.; (2) Methods: We exposed three generations (F0–F2) of B. glabrata snail embryos to different sizes of polystyrene nanoparticles and assessed responses.; (3) Results: We observed severe effects on F0 to F2 B. glabrata embryos, including size-dependent (30 to 500 nm) increases in mortality rates, size and dosage-dependent (1 to 100 ppm) effects on hatching rates with concentration-dependent toxicity in the 30 nm exposure group. The F2 generation embryos appear to be most responsive to detoxification (CYP450) and pollutant metabolism (HSP70) at 48-h-post-treatment (HPT), while our developmental marker (MATN1) was highly upregulated at 96-HPT. We also report a particle-size-dependent correlation in HSP70 and CYP450 mRNA expression, as well as enhanced upregulation in the offspring of exposed snails. We also observed significant reductions in hatching rates for F2.; (4) Conclusions: These findings indicate that F2 generation embryos appear to exhibit increased stress from toxic substances inherited from their parents and grandparents (F1 and F0). This study provides valuable insights into the impact of plastic particulate pollution on multiple generations and highlights the importance of monitoring and mitigating plastic waste. 

Extracting depth information from photon-limited, defocused images is challenging because depth from defocus (DfD) relies on accurate estimation of defocus blur, which is fundamentally sensitive to image noise. We present a novel approach to robustly measure object depths from photon-limited images along the defocused boundaries. It is based on a new image patch representation, Blurry-Edges, that explicitly stores and visualizes a rich set of low-level patch information, including boundaries, color, and smoothness. We develop a deep neural network architecture that predicts the Blurry-Edges representation from a pair of differently defocused images, from which depth can be analytically calculated using a novel DfD relation we derive. Our experiment shows that our method achieves the highest depth estimation accuracy on photon-limited images compared to a broad range of state-of-the-art DfD methods.