Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Genetics
Molecular scissors snip at cancer’s Achilles’ heel
Finding cancer’s vulnerable spots using CRISPR technology could lead to drugs that hit the disease hard.
- Genetics
Humans and Neandertals mated more recently than thought
Neandertals and humans interbred in Europe until shortly before Neandertals went extinct.
-
- Animals
Animal moms sacrifice a lot — sometimes even themselves
In the animal kingdom, there are bad mothers and good ones — and then there are those that let their kids eat them.
- Neuroscience
A vivid emotional experience requires the right genetics
A single gene deletion gives some people an extra vivid jolt to their emotional experience, a new study shows.
- Climate
Flood planners should not forget beavers
Beaver dams can reduce flooding downstream, new research shows.
- Microbes
Pig farm workers at greater risk for drug-resistant staph
Pig farm workers are six times as likely to carry multidrug-resistant staph than workers who have no contact with pigs.
- Health & Medicine
Kids who have had measles are at higher risk of fatal infections
Measles infection leaves kids vulnerable to other infectious diseases for much longer than scientists suspected.
- Neuroscience
Brain’s grid cells could navigate a curvy world
If we ever need to flee a dying Earth on curved space islands — as humanity was forced to do in 'Interstellar' — our brains will adapt with ease, a new mathematical analysis suggests.
- Genetics
Editing human germline cells sparks ethics debate
Human gene editing experiments raise scientific and societal questions.
- Chemistry
Bacteria staining method has long been misexplained
New research upends what scientists know about a classic lab technique, called gram staining, used for more than a century to characterized and classify bacteria.
- Microbes
Possible nearest living relatives to complex life found in seafloor mud
New phylum of sea-bottom archaea microbes could be closest living relatives yet found to the eukaryote domain of complex life that includes people.
