News

  1. Earth

    Acid test points to coming fish troubles

    Young fish can suffer severe damage from the ocean acidification expected within this century.

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  2. Health & Medicine

    Gene therapy helps counter hemophilia B

    Treatment enables cells to produce a key blood-clotting compound, allowing some patients to quit medication.

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  3. Chemistry

    Deep-sea battery comes to light

    Microbes fuel a weak electrical current at hydrothermal vents.

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  4. Earth

    Weather affects timing of some natural hazards

    Seasonal patterns in earthquakes and volcanic eruptions can be linked to rain and snow in certain locations.

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  5. Humans

    Tools of a kind

    People in southern Arabia around 100,000 years ago made tools like those of East Africans.

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  6. Life

    Mere fear shrinks bird families

    Just hearing recordings of predators, in the absence of any real danger, caused sparrows to raise fewer babies.

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  7. Life

    He’s no rat, he’s my brother

    Rodents exhibit empathy by setting trapped friends free.

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  8. Life

    Cilia control eating signal

    Little hairlike appendages in brain cells control weight by sequestering an appetite hormone.

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  9. Health & Medicine

    Bedbugs not averse to inbreeding

    The pests have also developed ways to resist common insecticides, research shows.

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  10. Life

    Building the body electric

    Eyes can be grown in a frog’s gut by changing cells’ electrical properties, scientists find, opening up new possibilities for generating and regenerating complex organs.

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  11. Earth

    Dead Sea once went dry

    The Holy Land’s salt lake ran out of water during a warm spell about 120,000 years ago, which suggests it could disappear again.

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  12. Space

    Distant world looks too ripe for life

    The first extrasolar planet to be discovered in its star’s habitable zone is probably inhospitably hot.

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