Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
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- Health & Medicine
Insects (the original white meat)
Dining on insects, usually more by choice than necessity, occurs in at least 100 countries — and may be better than chicken for both people and the environment.
- Animals
Pandamonium over a Tiny Pest
A parasite threatens efforts to protect China's endangered icon.
- Life
Rock-hard evidence
Newly discovered dinosaur tracks, the first ever reported from the Arabia Peninsula, indicate that a part of the now-arid region was teeming with dinosaurs about 150 million years ago.
- Health & Medicine
Vacillating stem cells
Unsuspected, ever-changing variation among stem cells in bone marrow helps determine the development path the cells will follow during differentiation.
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- Life
These colors don’t run
A chameleon employs different color-changing defenses depending on its predator.
- Life
Reviving extinct DNA
For the first time, scientists have resurrected a piece of DNA from an extinct animal — the Tasmanian tiger. The researchers engineered mice with a piece of the long-gone marsupial's DNA that turns on a collagen gene in cartilage-producing cells.
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- Physics
Catching the cell in action
A light microscope with high resolution may enable scientists to view the 3-D structures within living cells.
- Life
Sepsis buster
The Ashwell receptor, a sugar-binding protein on liver cells, helps fight sepsis by clearing blood-clotting factors. The discovery clears up years of mystery surrounding the receptor’s function.
