Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
Here’s how to use DNA to find elusive sharks
Hard-to-find sharks that divers and cameras miss appear in genetic traces in the ocean.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
