Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Life
Genetic tweaks manipulate DNA’s loops
Scientists have changed the loops and curls of DNA as it packs into a nucleus.
- Earth
4.1-billion-year-old crystal may hold earliest signs of life
A carbon impurity embedded inside an ancient zircon crystal suggests that life on Earth appeared before 4.1 billion years ago.
- Earth
4.1-billion-year-old crystal may hold earliest signs of life
New evidence suggests that life on Earth arose before 4.1 billion years ago, 300 million years earlier than previous estimates.
- Animals
Slow, cold reptiles may breathe like energetic birds
Finding birdlike air patterns in lungs of crocodilians and in more distantly related lizards raises the possibility that one-way airflow evolved far earlier than birds themselves did.
- Neuroscience
Signs of Huntington’s show up in the brain in childhood
Hints of Huntington’s disease show up in the brain long before symptoms do.
- Animals
Marine biologist chronicles a lifelong love of fishing
In A Naturalist Goes Fishing, a marine biologist takes readers on a round-the-world fishing expedition
- Paleontology
New evidence weakens case against climate in woolly mammoths’ death
Hunters responsible for woolly mammoths’ extinction, suggests a chemical analysis of juveniles’ tusks.
- Climate
High-flying birds recruited for meteorology
Monitoring the midflight movements of high-flying birds can provide valuable meteorological data, new research shows.
- Animals
How to drink like a bat
Some bats stick out their tongues and throbs carry nectar to their mouths.
- Paleontology
Dimetrodon’s diet redetermined
The reptilelike Dimetrodon dined mainly on amphibians and sharks, not big herbivores as scientists once believed.
- Animals
Bees get hooked on flowers’ caffeine buzz
Flowers drug honey bees with caffeinated nectar to trick them into returning, causing the bees to shift their foraging and dancing behaviors.
- Plants
Early cyanobacteria fossils dug up in 1965
In 1965, early photosynthetic plant fossils were discovered. The date of earliest oxygen-producing life forms has since been pushed much earlier.
