Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Health & Medicine
Overly Hungry for Frogs
Frogs are shipped half-way round the world to sate human appetites for this lean white meat.
- Life
Carlsbad’s 8 million ‘lost’ bats likely never existed
Thermal imaging and algorithms challenge famous estimate of extreme bat number.
- 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.
- Life
Everyday tree deaths have doubled
In past 50 years, apparently healthy forests have started losing trees faster, possibly because of climate change.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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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- Life
Step-by-step Evolution
Hard to find, but very fruitful when found, transitional fossils fill in the gaps in the paleontological record.
- Life
A Most Private Evolution
The most dramatic examples of the power of evolutionary theory may come from the strange and ugly stuff — biology too dumb to have been designed.
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- Computing
Computing Evolution
Scientists sift through genetic data sets to better map twisting branches in the tree of life.
