Life

  1. Life

    Duck-billed dino could slice and dice

    Ancient animal’s teeth were made of six different tissue types.

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  2. Life

    Mouse stem cells yield viable eggs

    Japanese scientists’ technical feat might provide new insights about protecting and extending human fertility.

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  3. Life

    Black mamba bite packs potent painkiller

    Scientists find that a component of snake venom blocks pain-sensing nerve signals.

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  4. Animals

    Right eye required for finding Mrs. Right

    Finches flirt unwisely if they can only use their left eyes.

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  5. Chemistry

    Chemical bond shields extreme microbes from poison

    Molecular structure explains how ‘arsenic life’ bacteria instead survive by fishing out phosphate from their surroundings.

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  6. Life

    Ants’ hive mind

    The insects make better decisions collectively than when on their own.

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  7. Life

    Vampire squid no Gordon Gekko

    Recently equated with greedy financiers, Vampyroteuthis infernalis is not really all that rapacious.

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  8. Life

    Breast cancer gets genetic profile

    Insights from new data may help improve treatment for some types of disease.

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  9. Life

    Birds catching malaria in Alaska

    The mosquito-spread disease may be transmitted north of the Arctic Circle as climate shifts.

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  10. Life

    How the cheetah loses its spots

    Mutations in one gene alter felines’ coat coloring.

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  11. Paleontology

    The Last Lost World

    Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene, by Lydia V. Pyne and Stephen J. Pyne.

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  12. Neuroscience

    Nonstick trick in the brain

    Getting drugs into the brain has proved to be a nanoscale puzzle: Anything bigger than 64 nanometers — about the size of a small virus — gets stuck in the space between brain cells once it gets through the blood-brain barrier. Justin Hanes of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and colleagues got around this rule by coating particles destined for brain cells in a dense layer of a polymer called polyethylene glycol.

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