Life

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We summarize the week's science breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Animals

    Male butterflies are driven to drink

    Monarch butterflies that winter in California, especially males that had a demanding day, search out dewdrops as a water source.

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  2. Paleontology

    Sea Dragons

    About 235 million years ago, as the earliest dinosaurs stomped about on land, some of their reptilian relatives slipped back into the surf, took on an aquatic lifestyle, and became ichthyosaurs—Greek for fish lizards.

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  3. Ecosystems

    Tougher Weeds? Borrowed gene helps wild sunflower

    Feeding concerns about developing superweeds, a test of sunflowers shows for the first time that a biologically engineered gene moving from a crop can give an advantage to wild relatives under naturalistic conditions.

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  4. Animals

    Flight puts the fight back into crickets

    Researchers are just discovering what gamblers in China have known for centuries—flying can make a losing cricket fight again.

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  5. Ecosystems

    Males live longer with all-year mating

    Male butterflies live longer in Madeira, where females are available year-round, than in Sweden, where females mature in one burst.

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  6. Plants

    Why tulips can’t dance

    An elliptical stem gives daffodils an unusual liveliness in the wind compared with tulips.

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  7. Animals

    When Ants Squeak

    In the past 20 years, researchers studying sound communication in ants have discovered a sort of ant-ernet, zinging with messages about lost relatives, great food, free rides for hitchhikers, caterpillars in search of ant partners, and impending doom.

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  8. Animals

    Bees log flight distances, train with maps

    After decades of work, scientists crack two problems of how bees navigate: reading bee odometers and mapping training flights.

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  9. Animals

    Slithering on Air: Flying snakes glide through the treetops

    The paradise tree snake flies by flattening its body and slithering through the air.

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  10. Animals

    Strong Medicine: Over-the-counter remedy snags snakes

    Acetaminophen—the active ingredient in Tylenol—vanquishes brown tree snakes, the bane of Guam.

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  11. Ecosystems

    Pfiesteria’s Bite: Microbe may kill fish by skinning, not poisoning

    At least one kind of Pfiesteria—accused of killing fish and threatening human health—does not produce a toxin but kills by eating holes in fish's skin, some researchers say.

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  12. Plants

    Recent tree scourge poses garden threat

    Lab tests suggest that a lethal disease of oak trees in California and Oregon could strike some popular garden shrubs in the rhododendron family.

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