Life

  1. Health & Medicine

    50 years ago, starving tumors of oxygen proposed as weapon in cancer fight

    Starving cancerous tumors of oxygen was proposed to help kill them. But the approach can make some cancer cells more aggressive.

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  2. Health & Medicine

    An enzyme involved in cancer and aging gets a close-up

    The structure of telomerase, described with the greatest detail yet, may give researchers clues to cancer treatments and other telomerase-related illnesses.

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  3. Animals

    Fighting like an animal doesn’t always mean a duel to the death

    Conflict resolution within species isn’t always deadly and often involves cost-benefit analyses.

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  4. Genetics

    Adapting to life in the north may have been a real headache

    A cold-sensing protein has adapted to different local climates, also affecting risk of migraine.

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  5. Animals

    This ancient fowl bit like a dinosaur and pecked like a bird

    A new fossil of Ichthyornis dispar helped scientists create a 3-D reconstruction of the ancient bird’s skull, shedding light on early bird evolution.

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  6. Climate

    Bull sharks and bottlenose dolphins are moving north as the ocean warms

    Rising temperatures are making ocean waters farther north more hospitable for a variety of marine species.

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  7. Particle Physics

    Readers puzzled by particle physics and a papal decree

    Readers had questions about neutrinoless double beta decay and the history of domesticated rabbits.

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  8. Animals

    Defenseless moths do flying impressions of scary bees and wasps

    Faking that erratic bee flight or no-nonsense wasp zoom might save a moth’s life.

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  9. Animals

    How a social lifestyle helped drive a river otter species to near extinction

    A reconstruction of 20th-century hunting practices reveals why one species of Amazon river otters nearly went extinct while another persisted.

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  10. Plants

    New genetic details may help roses come up smelling like, well, roses

    A detailed genetic look at China roses and an old European species shows that there’s a built-in trade-off between color and scent.

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  11. Animals

    See (and hear) the stunning diversity of bowhead whales’ songs

    Bowhead whales display a huge range in their underwater melodies, but the drivers behind this diversity remain murky.

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  12. Genetics

    New genetic sleuthing tools helped track down the Golden State Killer suspect

    DNA sleuths may have adapted new techniques for identifying John and Jane Does to track down a serial killer suspect.

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