Life
We summarize the week's science breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Ecosystems
Living Physics
From green leaves to bird brains, biological systems may exploit quantum phenomena.
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- Plants
Landscaper’s darling hybridizes into an environmental nuisance
Variation underlies the Callery pear tree’s transformation .
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- Plants
Oops, missed that tree
Until now, an acacia common in its African homeland had no scientific name
- Animals
Ants do real estate the simple way
Tracking ants with anti-shoplifter RFID tags has inspired a new, simplified view of how a colony finds a home
- Earth
A little air pollution boosts vegetation’s carbon uptake
Aerosols bumped up world’s plant productivity by 25 percent in the 1960s and 1970s, new research suggests.
- Earth
Fossil of a walking seal found
A fossil skeleton discovered in the Canadian Arctic could represent a missing link in pinniped evolution.
- Life
Fossil evidence for a Goldilocks tyrannosaur
A newly described species of tyrannosaur helps fill in details about the fearsome meat-eating dinosaurs.
- Life
New neurons don’t heal
New neurons produced in the brain after a stroke don’t grow into all the cell types needed to heal the wound.
- Earth
An earlier appearance for the first land plants
Fossilized pollen could show that modern land plants evolved earlier than thought.
- Planetary Science
Antarctic ecosystem holds unusual microbes
Long isolated deep under a glacier, life thrives in dark, salty water by breathing iron and eating sulfates.
