Life

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We summarize the week's science breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Life

    Serotonin turns shy locusts into cereal killers

    Serotonin can turn solitary locusts into swarming biblical-scale crop destroyers.

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  2. Life

    Triceratops may have been headbangers

    Lesions on Triceratops fossils are attributed to head-to-head combat in a new study.

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  3. Life

    A honeybee tells two from three

    Honeybees can generalize about numbers, at least up to three, a new study reports.

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  4. Health & Medicine

    Overly Hungry for Frogs

    Frogs are shipped half-way round the world to sate human appetites for this lean white meat.

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  5. Life

    Carlsbad’s 8 million ‘lost’ bats likely never existed

    Thermal imaging and algorithms challenge famous estimate of extreme bat number.

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  6. Ecosystems

    Pacific Northwest salmon poisoning killer whales

    A protected population of resident orcas around Vancouver Island and Puget Sound is the planet’s most PCB-contaminated mammals, says one researcher.

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  7. Life

    Everyday tree deaths have doubled

    In past 50 years, apparently healthy forests have started losing trees faster, possibly because of climate change.

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  8. Life

    As cells age, the nucleus lets the bad guys in

    A study tracks a growing 'leakiness' in the membrane of the cell nucleus that could contribute to aging and even to diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

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  9. Life

    Three deep-sea fish families now one

    Male and young whalefish look so different from females that scientists had mistakenly put them all in different families.

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  10. Health & Medicine

    Epigenetics reveals unexpected, and some identical, results

    One study finds tissue-specific methylation signatures in the genome; another a similarity between identical twins in DNA’s chemical tagging.

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  11. Life

    Darwin’s natural selection redefined the idea of design

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  12. Life

    Step-by-step Evolution

    Hard to find, but very fruitful when found, transitional fossils fill in the gaps in the paleontological record.

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