Life

  1. Animals

    Grow-Slow Potion: Pheromone keeps bee youngsters youthful

    Researchers have identified a compound made by the senior workers in a honeybee colony that prolongs the time that teenage bees stay home babysitting.

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  2. Animals

    Color at Night: Geckos can distinguish hues by dim moonlight

    The first vertebrate to ace tests of color vision at low light levels—tests that people flunk—is an African gecko.

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  3. Paleontology

    Subway dig in L.A. yields fossil trove

    Fossil finds made when a subway line was extended from Los Angeles into the San Fernando Valley include bones of mastodons, ground sloths, extinct bison and camels, and 39 new species of fish.

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  4. Plants

    Botany under the Mistletoe

    Twisters, spitters, and other flowery thoughts for romantic moments.

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  5. Animals

    Birds may inherit their taste for the town

    Tests switching cliff swallow nestlings to colonies of different sizes suggest the birds inherit their preference for group size.

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  6. Paleontology

    Flightless Feathered Friends

    New finds of fossil penguins, as well as analyses of the characteristics and DNA of living penguins, are shedding light on the evolution of these flightless birds.

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  7. Paleontology

    Plenty of dinosaurs yet to be found

    Despite a dramatic surge in dinosaur discoveries in recent years, paleontologists won't soon run out of interesting new fossils to unearth, a new analysis suggests.

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  8. Paleontology

    . . . and the big bird that didn’t

    The California condor, one of today's largest and rarest birds, may have survived the last ice age because of its varied diet.

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  9. Paleontology

    The big fish that went away . . .

    Fossils found near Charleston, S.C., suggest that an extinct species of billfish related to today's swordfish and marlin would easily exceed the lengths documented for world-record specimens of those oft-sought sports fish.

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  10. Ecosystems

    One-Celled Socialites

    A wave of research on the social lives of bacteria offers insights into the evolution of cooperation and may lead to medical breakthroughs that neutralize virulent bacterial strains.

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  11. Paleontology

    Dino Dwarf: Island living may have led to ancient downsizing

    Fossils unearthed at a German quarry hint that members of one species of dinosaur that lived in the region about 152 million years ago evolved to be abnormally small because of the constraints of its island ecosystem.

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  12. Plants

    Give and Take: Plant parasites dole out genes while stealing nutrients

    New evidence suggests that parasitic plants can transfer their own genes into host plants.

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