News
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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.
By Susan Milius -
Plants
Why tulips can’t dance
An elliptical stem gives daffodils an unusual liveliness in the wind compared with tulips.
By Susan Milius -
Dendrite decline in schizophrenia
Cell connections in a part of the brain's frontal lobe appear to dwindle in people with schizophrenia.
By Bruce Bower -
Keys to expertise in the brain
A brain region linked to face recognition may foster expertise at identifying items in any category a person strives to master.
By Bruce Bower -
Astronomy
Milky Way gets a new layer
Astronomers propose that 150 billion corpses of sunlike stars may blanket the visible disk of the galaxy.
By Ron Cowen -
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.
By Susan Milius -
Earth
DDT treatment turns male fish into mothers
Injecting into fish eggs an estrogen-mimicking form of the pesticide DDT transforms genetically male medaka fish into apparent females able to lay eggs that produce young.
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Health & Medicine
Novel diabetes strain has rapid onset
Japanese researchers have confirmed that some patients with type 1 diabetes have a novel form of the disease that's not caused by immune cells attacking the pancreas.
By Nathan Seppa -
Physics
Black hole recipe: Slow light, swirl atoms
Whirling clouds of atoms may swallow light the way black holes do, possibly giving scientists a way to test the general theory of relativity in the lab, not just in outer space.
By Peter Weiss -
Anthropology
Ancient populations were game for growth
Archaeological evidence of a Stone Age shift in dietary preferences, from slow to swift small game, suggests that the human population rose sharply sometime between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.
By Bruce Bower -
Anthropology
Drowned land holds clue to first Americans
A map of a now-flooded region charts the path that Asians may have taken to first reach the Americas.
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Humans
Treaty Nears on Gene-Altered Exports
In an effort to help preserve biodiversity, negotiators from 130 nations crafted rules of conduct for international trade in living, genetically engineered organisms.
By Janet Raloff