Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Plants
Glitch splits hermaphrodite flowers
In a newly proposed scenario, polyploidy may trigger perfectly good hermaphrodite plants to evolve gender forms.
- Paleontology
Fossils’ ear design hints at aquatic lifestyle
New studies of distinctive skull structures in fossils of one of Earth's earliest-known four-limbed creatures suggest the animal could hear best when it was underwater.
- Animals
Skin Chemistry: Poison frogs upgrade toxins from prey
For the first time, scientists have found a poisonous frog that takes up a toxin from its prey and then tweaks the chemical to make it a more deadly weapon.
- Animals
To Bee He or She: Honeybees use novel sex-setting switch
After more than a decade of work, an international team has found the main gene that separates the girls from the boys among honeybees.
- Animals
Snapping shrimp whip up a riot of bubbles
High-speed video and fancy math demonstrate that snapping shrimp make so much noise by popping bubbles.
- Paleontology
Oh, what a sticky web they wove
A look inside a piece of 130-million-year-old amber has revealed a thin filament of spider silk with sticky droplets that look just like those produced by modern spiders.
- Animals
Musical Pairs: Egg-deploying bird species divide for a song
A new genetic analysis bolsters the idea that musical taste, rather than geography, split Africa's indigobirds into multiple species.
- Ecosystems
Risky High Life: Mountain creatures prove extra-vulnerable
Some of the species hardest hit by climate change will be those living in particular mountain highlands.
- Plants
Next loosestrife is already loose
A Florida botanist warns against Nymphoides cristata and Rotala rotundifolia, very troublesome escapees from aquariums and water gardens.
- Plants
Misunderstood stripes confuse individuality
In the debate over how many fungi make up one lichen body, a researcher argues for two unrelated fungal species in the same lichen.
- Plants
Everglades plant is he, then she, then he
Sawgrass, the signature plant of the Everglades, switches genders twice during its week of blooming and thus reduces the chances of self- fertilization.
- Ecosystems
Shark Serengeti: Ocean predators have diversity hot spots
The first search for oceanic spots of exceptional diversity in predators has turned up marine versions of the teeming Serengeti plains.
