Life

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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

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  1. 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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  2. 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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  3. Animals

    How roaches developed disgust at first bite

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

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  4. 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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  5. Life

    A molecular window on itch

    Researchers discover chemical puppet master behind the need to scratch.

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  6. Life

    Foot fungi a thriving, diverse community

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

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  7. Life

    Experimental vaccine protects against many flu viruses

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

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  8. Plants

    Giant genomes felled by DNA sequencing advances

    Complete genetic blueprints have been collected for several conifer species.

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  9. Psychology

    Dog sniffs out grammar

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

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  10. 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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  11. Life

    Analog circuits boost power in living computers

    New cell-based computers do division and logarithms more like a slide rule than a laptop.

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  12. 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.

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