Life

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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Life

    View to a cell

    In 2013, Science News published a photo essay highlighting advances in microscopy that illuminate life within us, work that has now earned three researchers the 2014 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

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  2. Life

    Response to bacterial infection depends on time of day

    Mice that got Salmonella in the evening fared better than those given the microbe in the morning.

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  3. Life

    Microbes at home in your gut may also be influencing your brain

    When your gut grumbles or growls, it’s speaking to your brain. And it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Evolution favors guts that can tell a brain what they want. So it’s not surprising that the brain and the gut should have a reliable communications connection. But suppose the gut’s messaging system was hacked by […]

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  4. Plants

    Mosses frozen in time come back to life

    Buried under a glacier for hundreds of years, plants regrow in the lab.

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  5. Animals

    How roaches developed disgust at first bite

    A change in taste cells makes glucose-baited traps repellent.

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  6. Life

    Tests show that deadly flu could spread among people

    Experiment shows that new influenza virus transmits through air between ferrets, a common experimental stand-in for humans.

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  7. Life

    A molecular window on itch

    Researchers discover chemical puppet master behind the need to scratch.

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  8. Life

    Foot fungi a thriving, diverse community

    A skin census finds that toes and heels have the most fungal types.

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  9. Life

    Experimental vaccine protects against many flu viruses

    Ferrets that receive shot can fight off variety of influenza strains.

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  10. Plants

    Giant genomes felled by DNA sequencing advances

    Complete genetic blueprints have been collected for several conifer species.

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  11. Psychology

    Dog sniffs out grammar

    After years of word training, a canine intuitively figures out how simple sentences work.

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  12. Life

    Viruses and mucus team up to ward off bacteria

    Phages may play an unforeseen role in immune protection, researchers find.

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