All Stories

  1. Animals

    Courting both ways

    Some extra dopamine, and male fruit flies like boys too.

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  2. Life

    These colors don’t run

    A chameleon employs different color-changing defenses depending on its predator.

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  3. Health & Medicine

    Donor dilemma

    Blood donors age 16 or 17 are more apt to faint than older donors.

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  4. Chemistry

    Help the Climate: Empty the Fridge

    Yesterday, I reported that in hopes of slowing down global warming, some nations were interested in strengthening the Montreal Protocol – a United Nations treaty to curb releases of chemicals that endanger stratospheric ozone. But I didn’t really get into what they had up their sleeves. It turns out they want signatory nations to eliminate […]

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  5. 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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  6. Tech

    I, computer

    Bacteria that can "flip pancakes" with their DNA are the first microbes engineered to be living computers.

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  7. Health & Medicine

    Itchy and scratchy

    People with a close relative who has had shingles face a heightened risk of getting the skin disease, and should probably be first in line to get the vaccine.

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  8. Climate

    When Is a Consensus on Climate Not a Consensus?

    A protein chemist reported he had assembled a list of more than 30,000 scientists who challenge the idea that human releases of greenhouse gases are warming Earth's climate.

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  9. Life

    For bacteria, it’s a hard-knock life

    Bacteria stick better to rigid surfaces.

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  10. Physics

    Catching the cell in action

    A light microscope with high resolution may enable scientists to view the 3-D structures within living cells.

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  11. Chemistry

    Freon’s Cool Link to Climate

    Quick: What’s the name of the big UN global climate treaty? If you said the Kyoto Protocol – you’d be wrong. Because it’s a trick question. Although the Kyoto Protocol is indeed the treaty developed to address the issue of arresting global warming and the climate perturbations that will be spawned by such a growing […]

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  12. 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.

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