Earth

  1. 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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  2. Health & Medicine

    E. coli evade detection by going dormant

    When stressed, bacteria can temporarily turn comatose and dodge germ-screening tests.

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  3. Earth

    Arctic has taken a turn for the warmer

    Northern climate has changed substantially in the last five years, and the shift is probably permanent.

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  4. Earth

    Polar ice sheets are synchronized swimmers

    Glaciers in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres advance and retreat together.

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  5. Humans

    Germs’ persistence: Nothing to sneeze at

    Years ago, I read (probably in Science News) that viruses can’t survive long outside their hosts. That implied any surface onto which a sneezed-out germ found itself — such as the arm of a chair, kitchen counter or car-door handle — would effectively decontaminate itself within hours to a day. A pair of new flu papers now indicates that although many germs will die within hours, none of us should count on it. Given the right environment, viruses can remain infectious — potentially for many weeks, one of the studies finds.

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  6. Life

    Biology’s big bang had a long fuse

    The fossil record’s earliest troves of animal life are the result of more than 200 million years of evolution.

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  7. Life

    Cretaceous Thanksgiving

    A fossilized feathered dinosaur dined on bird not long before its own demise.

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  8. Earth

    Oxygen a bit player in Earth’s outer core

    Sulfur and silicon may be more abundant in the planet’s heart than thought.

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  9. Animals

    Lost to history: The “churk”

    More than a half-century ago, researchers at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center outside Washington, D.C., engaged in some creative barnyard breeding. Their goal was the development of fatherless turkeys — virgin hens that would reproduce via parthenogenesis. Along the way, and ostensibly quite by accident, an interim stage of this work resulted in a rooster-fathered hybrid that the scientists termed a churk.

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  10. Climate

    Matt Crenson, Reconstructions

    In ancient Southwest droughts, a warning of dry times to come.

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  11. Earth

    Dirty air fosters precipitation extremes

    Changes to clouds encourage drought in dry areas and torrential downpours in moist places.

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  12. Tech

    Hooking fish, not endangered turtles

    A tuna fisherman has taken it upon himself to make the seas safer for sea turtles, animals that are threatened or endangered with extinction worldwide. He’s designed a new hook that he says will make bait unavailable to marine birds and turtles until long after it’s sunk well below the range where these animals venture to eat.

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