Vol. 205 No. 8
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More Stories from the April 20, 2024 issue

  1. Health & Medicine

    Don’t use unsterilized tap water to rinse your sinuses. It may carry brain-eating amoebas

    Two new studies document rare cases in which people who rinsed sinuses with unsterilized tap got infected with brain-eating amoebas.

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  2. Paleontology

    An extinct sofa-sized turtle may have lived alongside humans

    Peltocephalus maturin was one of the biggest turtles ever, but unlike similarly sized prehistoric freshwater turtles, it lived thousands of years ago.

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  3. Humans

    These are the chemicals that give teens pungent body odor

    Steroids and high levels of carboxylic acids in teenagers’ body odor give off a mix of pleasant and acrid scents.

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  4. Earth

    Climate change is changing how we keep time

    Polar ice sheets are melting faster, slowing Earth’s spin. That is changing how we synchronize our clocks to tell time.

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  5. Physics

    A teeny device can measure subtle shifts in Earth’s gravitational field

    No bigger than a grain of rice, the heart of the instrument is the latest entrant in the quest to build ever tinier gravity-measuring devices.

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  6. Archaeology

    Human brains found at archaeological sites are surprisingly well-preserved

    Analyzing a new archive of 4,400 human brains cited in the archaeological record reveals the organ’s unique chemistry might prevent decay.

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  7. Space

    How a sugar acid crucial for life could have formed in interstellar clouds

    Computer calculations and lab experiments have revealed a possible mechanism for the creation of glyceric acid, which has been seen in meteorites.

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  8. Animals

    American bullfrogs may be threatening a rare frog species in Brazil

    A search for environmental DNA from critically endangered Pithecopus rusticus frogs turned up DNA from invasive American bullfrogs instead.

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  9. Animals

    By fluttering its wings, this bird uses body language to tell its mate ‘after you’

    New observations suggest that Japanese tits gesture to communicate complex messages — a rare ability in the animal kingdom and a first seen in birds.

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  10. Ecosystems

    Flowers may be big antennas for bees’ electrical signals

    The finding suggests a way for plants to share information about nearby pollinators and communicate when to trigger nectar production.

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  11. Science & Society

    Not all cultures value happiness over other aspects of well-being

    Nordic countries topped the 2024 world happiness rankings. But culture dictates how people respond to surveys of happiness, a researcher argues.

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  12. Artificial Intelligence

    AI learned how to sway humans by watching a cooperative cooking game

    New research used the game Overcooked to show how offline reinforcement learning algorithms could teach bots to collaborate with — or manipulate — us.

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  13. Health & Medicine

    50 years ago, margarine’s ‘healthy’ reputation began to melt away

    In the 1970s, scientists began to suspect that margarine was bad for heart health. A key component, artificial trans fat, was a major factor.

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