Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- 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 […]
- Plants
Mosses frozen in time come back to life
Buried under a glacier for hundreds of years, plants regrow in the lab.
- Animals
How roaches developed disgust at first bite
A change in taste cells makes glucose-baited traps repellent.
- 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.
- Life
A molecular window on itch
Researchers discover chemical puppet master behind the need to scratch.
- Life
Foot fungi a thriving, diverse community
A skin census finds that toes and heels have the most fungal types.
- Life
Experimental vaccine protects against many flu viruses
Ferrets that receive shot can fight off variety of influenza strains.
- Plants
Giant genomes felled by DNA sequencing advances
Complete genetic blueprints have been collected for several conifer species.
- Psychology
Dog sniffs out grammar
After years of word training, a canine intuitively figures out how simple sentences work.
- Life
Viruses and mucus team up to ward off bacteria
Phages may play an unforeseen role in immune protection, researchers find.
- Life
Analog circuits boost power in living computers
New cell-based computers do division and logarithms more like a slide rule than a laptop.
- Humans
Highlights from the Biology of Genomes meeting
Highlights from the genome biology meeting held May 7-11 in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., include an enormous tree's enormous genome, genes for strong-swimming sperm, and back-to-Africa migration some 3,000 years ago.
