Life

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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Life

    Fastest spores in the West (or anywhere)

    SEE THE VIDEO: Researchers film a fungus catapulting its spores with an acceleration greater than what astronauts feel.

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  2. Life

    Fish glowing red

    Plenty of reef creatures fluoresce red, even where seawater absorbs red sunlight.

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  3. Life

    New ant species found

    One weird ant suggests lost world of ancient ants living underground

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  4. Neuroscience

    Breaking the Barrier

    A technique combining ultrasound pulses with microbubbles may help scientists move therapeutic drugs across the brain’s protective divide.

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  5. Life

    Sting Operation

    Scientists use bees and wasps to sniff out the illicit and the dangerous.

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  6. Life

    A ‘foxi’ gene for dog baldness

    A FOXI3 mutation makes some dogs bald.

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  7. Life

    This bite won’t hurt a bit

    A team dissects the physics of a mosquito bite, working to find a way to design gentler needles.

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  8. Paleontology

    Dino domination was in the cards, maybe

    A new study finds that early dinosaurs coexisted with and were outnumbered by a competing species. Dinosaurs eventually reigned supreme anyway, but perhaps not because they were better.

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  9. Life

    Giant honeybees do the wave

    Giant bees coordinate and make waves that would rival those in any football stadium. Predators of the bees don’t find it cheering.

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  10. Life

    Female frogs play the field

    A female frog insures a safe home for her young by mating with many males.

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  11. Neuroscience

    Highly wired

    Men’s brain tissue shows higher density of neuron connections than similar tissue from women.

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  12. Life

    Birds duet to fight and seek

    The first study to track birds in the forest via microphone arrays shows that birds double up on fight songs, or play Marco Polo in tropical shrubbery.

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