News in Brief
- Astronomy
Comet carries alcohol, sugar
Sugar and alcohol are just two of the ingredients that go into making a comet.
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- Astronomy
White dwarf upsets planetary system, consumes evidence
Rocky planets are disintegrating around a white dwarf, the core of a dead star.
- Animals
For glowworms, the brightest girls get the guy
Brighter female glowworms attract more mates and lay more eggs than their dimmer peers.
- Neuroscience
Sex influences ability to assess crowd’s emotion
New analyses explain how people detect an angry mob or a happy party.
- Neuroscience
High-fat diet’s negative effect on memory may fade
Brain may find way to compensate for memory impairments linked to high-fat diets, study in rats shows.
- Paleontology
300 million-year-old giant shark swam the Texas seas
Fossil find shows oldest known ‘supershark,’ about the size of a limo, prowled the ocean 300 million years ago.
- Neuroscience
Multitaskers do worse on tasks that require focus
Multitasking is more likely to impair teens’ focusing ability than improve it, study testing attention skills finds.
- Life
Genetic tweaks manipulate DNA’s loops
Scientists have changed the loops and curls of DNA as it packs into a nucleus.
- Earth
4.1-billion-year-old crystal may hold earliest signs of life
New evidence suggests that life on Earth arose before 4.1 billion years ago, 300 million years earlier than previous estimates.
- Humans
U.S. is growing more genetically diverse
Young Americans are more genetically diverse than previous generations, a new DNA analysis reveals.
- Genetics
Microbes may reveal colon cancer mutations
Certain microbial mixes are associated with particular DNA mutations in colon cancer, a new study suggests.
