Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
Intricate silk helps net-casting spiders ensnare prey in webs
Rufous net-casting spiders can tune the stiffness and elasticity of their webs thanks to loops of silk, scanning electron microscope images reveal.
- Health & Medicine
A lab on wheels is tracking HIV spread in war-torn Ukraine
During a test drive, the mobile lab van uncovered a drug-resistant HIV strain that sprung up after the ongoing war with Russia started.
- Genetics
Wanderlust may be written in our DNA
A new study suggests that inherited traits explain a small but measurable share of why some people relocate far from where they were born.
- Health & Medicine
This itch-triggering protein also sends signals to stop scratching
The TRPV4 protein’s dual nature, found in studies with mice, may complicate the hunt for human itch treatments
- Paleontology
A mouth built for efficiency may have helped the earliest bird fly
A flexible tongue, sensitive beak and teethlike cones in the mouth may have helped Archaeopteryx generate enough energy to fly.
- Animals
Some dog breeds carry a higher risk of breathing problems
Research reveals more short-snouted dogs besides pugs and bulldogs that struggle with breathing. Pekingese and Japanese Chins topped the study's list.
- Animals
Regeneration of fins and limbs relies on a shared cellular playbook
The findings strengthen the case that regeneration is an old trait, offering insights into how complex tissues rebuild themselves.
- Animals
How tracking golden eagles in Nevada revealed a desert ‘death vortex’
Something is stopping Dry Lake Valley’s golden eagles from reproducing and killing raptors that fly in to fill the void.
- Animals
Some snakes lack the ‘hunger hormone.’ Experts are hungry to know why
The complex biology of ghrelin, the hunger hormone, has researchers wondering how its absence helps snakes last a long time with no food, if at all.
- Oceans
Evolution didn’t wait long after the dinosaurs died
New plankton arrived just a few millennia — maybe even decades — after the Chicxulub asteroid, forcing a rethink of evolution's catastrophe response speed.
- Animals
A sea turtle boom may be hiding a population collapse
In Cape Verde, conservation has boosted the sea turtle population 100-fold — but the male-female balance is way off.
- Ecosystems
Food chains in Caribbean coral reefs are getting shorter
Shorter food chains could mean reefs are less able to weather changes in food availability, threatening an already vulnerable ecosystem.
