Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
Apes do the darndest things
Several chimp behaviors have researchers wondering if apes are a good model for early hominid life.
- Neuroscience
Misfolded proteins implicated in more brain diseases
Alzheimer’s, other disorders show similarity to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and other prion infections.
- Life
Small number of genes trigger embryo development
New views of early embryo development reveal differences between humans and mice.
- Animals
When octopuses dance beak to beak
The larger Pacific striped octopus does sex, motherhood and shrimp pranks like nobody else.
- Anthropology
Minutes after encountering danger, lemurs yawn
Madagascar primates yawn within minutes of encountering threats.
- Oceans
Earth got first whiff of oxygen 3.2 billion years ago
Photosynthesis by early cyanobacteria pumped oxygen into Earth’s oceans 200 million years earlier than once thought, new geochemical analyses show.
- Paleontology
Earliest sea scorpion discovered in Iowa
Earliest sea scorpion discovered in impact crater in Iowa.
- Animals
A monkey uses a stick to pick its teeth and nose
A wild bearded capuchin monkey in Brazil was caught using tools to pick its nose and teeth.
- Animals
Rabbits leave a mark on soil long after they are gone
Twenty years after rabbits were removed from a sub-Antarctic island, soil fungus has yet to return to normal, a study finds.
- Animals
Same math describes relationship between diverse predators and prey
From lions to plankton, predators have about the same relationship to the amount of prey, a big-scale ecology study predicts.
- Health & Medicine
How farm life can prevent allergies
Farm dust prevents allergies by turning on an anti-inflammatory enzyme in the cells lining mice’s lungs.
- Life
Unhelpful adaptations can speed up evolution
Unhelpful changes in gene activity stimulate natural selection.
