Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
Lights at night trick wild wallabies into breeding late
Artificial lighting is driving wild tammar wallabies to breed out of sync with peak season for food
- Life
‘Protocells’ show ability to reproduce
Lab-made “protocells” mimic the division process of early cells, and may help researchers understand cellular evolution.
- Animals
Some bats chug nectar with conveyor belt tongues
Grooved bat tongues work like escalators or conveyor belts, transporting nectar from tip to mouth.
- Animals
Math describes sheep herd fluctuations
Scientists have developed equations to describe the motion of a herd of sheep.
- Animals
Life in the polar ocean is surprisingly active in the dark winter
The Arctic polar winter may leave marine ecosystems dark for weeks on end, but life doesn’t shut down, a new study finds.
- Animals
Don’t judge a whale’s gut microbiome by diet alone
Evolutionary history and diet may both determine the microbes that live in a baleen whale's stomach, researchers report.
- Neuroscience
How a fat hormone might make us born to run
Many runners finish long races in a euphoric mood. The underpinnings of this runner’s high may involve many chemicals, including the fat hormone leptin.
- Animals
Alpine bee tongues shorten as climate warms
Pollinators’ match with certain alpine flowers erodes as climate change pushes fast evolution.
- Health & Medicine
What makes cells stop dividing and growing
Scientists have found that the protein GATA4 helps control cellular senescence, and may be a target for treating aging-related diseases.
- Paleontology
New dinosaur identified in Alaska
New species of duck-billed dinosaur discovered in the Alaskan permafrost.
- Life
For people, mealtime is all the time
People eat for most of their waking hours, which may affect sleep and weight.
- Neuroscience
Separate cell types encode memory’s time, place
Cells called ocean cells help store a memory’s “where,” while other cells called island cells help store a memory’s “when.”
