Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Life
Black mamba bite packs potent painkiller
Scientists find that a component of snake venom blocks pain-sensing nerve signals.
- Animals
Right eye required for finding Mrs. Right
Finches flirt unwisely if they can only use their left eyes.
- 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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- Life
Vampire squid no Gordon Gekko
Recently equated with greedy financiers, Vampyroteuthis infernalis is not really all that rapacious.
- Life
Breast cancer gets genetic profile
Insights from new data may help improve treatment for some types of disease.
- 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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- Paleontology
The Last Lost World
Ice Ages, Human Origins, and the Invention of the Pleistocene, by Lydia V. Pyne and Stephen J. Pyne.
- 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.
- Animals
Face Smarts
Macaques, sheep and even wasps may join people as masters at facial recognition.
- Humans
Africans’ genes mute on human birthplace
Latest DNA studies confirm previous research on the prehistory of African groups, but still can’t locate the root of the species.
