Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Plants
A leaf’s geometry determines whether it falls far from its tree
Shape and symmetry help determine where a leaf lands — and if the tree it came from can recoup the leaf’s carbon as it decomposes.
- Health & Medicine
Humans have shockingly few ways to treat fungal infections
It's not quite as bad as The Last of Us. But progress has been achingly slow in developing new antifungal vaccines and drugs.
- Animals
This tool-wielding assassin turns its prey’s defenses into a trap
This assassin bug's ability to use a tool — bees’ resin — could shed light on how the ability evolved in other animals.
- Environment
Skyborne specks of life may influence rainfall patterns
A study of weather on a mountain in Greece reveal that bioparticles in the sky may drive fluctuations in rainfall patterns more broadly.
- Animals
Chimp chatter is a lot more like human language than previously thought
Chimpanzees combine hoots, calls and grunts to convey far more concepts than with single sounds alone. It may be a first among nonhuman animals.
- Plants
Putrid plants can reek of hot rotting flesh with one evolutionary trick
Some stinky plants independently evolved an enzyme to take the same molecule behind our bad breath and turn it into the smell of rotting flesh.
- Oceans
Before altering the air, microbes oxygenated large swaths of the sea
Hundreds of millions of years before oxygen surged in the atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago, swaths of oxygen winked in and out of existence in the ocean.
- Health & Medicine
Lining medical stents with hairlike fuzz could fend off infections
Implanted tubes that transport bodily fluids can get gross. A lab prototype suggests a new vibration-based way to keep them clean and prevent infection.
- Animals
Ancient poems document the decline of the Yangtze finless porpoise
The porpoise is critically endangered. Ancient Chinese poems reveal the animal’s range has dropped about 65 percent over the past 1,400 years.
- Animals
Frog ribbits erupt via an extravagant variety of vocal sacs
Shape matters as well as size in the great range of male frog show-off equipment for competitive seductive serenades.
- Health & Medicine
A man let snakes bite him 202 times. His blood helped create a new antivenom
A new antivenom relies on antibodies from the blood of Tim Friede, who immunized himself against snakebites by injecting increasing doses of venom into his body.
- Animals
Cool water could protect sea stars from a mysterious disease
Sunflower sea stars discovered taking refuge in fjords may offer clues to saving the critically endangered species from sea star wasting disease.
