Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
Lizards may scale back head bobbing to avoid predators
Brown anoles may scale back mating signals to avoid being eaten.
- Life
‘The Amoeba in the Room’ uncloaks a hidden realm of tiny life
Mycologist Nicholas Money reveals the secret (and dramatic) lives of amoebas, bacteria, fungi and other often-overlooked microbes in The Amoeba in the Room: Lives of the Microbes.
- Animals
For upside-down sloths, what goes down can’t come up
Upside-down sloths have to hold their organs up and their food down.
- Animals
Winds predict deadly jellyfish blooms
A change in the winds flowing over Australia’s Great Barrier Reef coincides with reports of the potentially fatal Irukandji syndrome.
- Animals
Fly more, live longer
An examination of animal lifestyles reveals that the most important factor linked to longer life is the ability to fly.
- Genetics
Qatari people carry genetic trace of early migrants out of Africa
Qatari genomes carry shards of DNA that date back 60,000 years, when humans began to leave Africa.
- Environment
Fukushima contamination affects butterfly larvae
Butterfly larvae fed leaves with radioactive cesium from the Fukushima nuclear disaster had a higher rate of death and development abnormalities than larvae that got leaves from a location farther from the accident.
- Paleontology
Fragments of long-bodied dino found in Argentina
Named Leinkupal laticauda, the new species dino probably lived into the early Cretaceous period, which began roughly 145 million years ago.
- Animals
Anemone eats bird, and other surprising animal meals
A fuzzy green anemone eating a bird many times its size shows that you can’t take anything for granted when it comes to which animals can eat each other.
- Paleontology
Giant 17-million-year-old fossil sperm found
Giant sperm have been found in 17-million-year-old fossilized mussel shrimp. The specimens, collected in Queensland, Australia, sport the oldest petrified sex cells on record.
- Health & Medicine
Two U.S. health care workers fall ill after treating patient with MERS
Two Florida hospital employees have reportedly fallen ill with flulike symptoms after coming in contact with a patient suffering from MERS.
- Neuroscience
Playing football linked to brain changes
Division I college football players have smaller hippocampi, especially if they’ve had concussions.
