News
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Handsome blue tit dads have more sons
A female blue tit with a particularly dashing mate is more likely to have sons than is a female matched with a ho-hum guy.
- Animals
Marine Mules: Near-sterile hyrids boost coral diversity
Reef corals that spawn in great mixed-up soups of many species may be maintaining their diversity because their hybrids are sterile mules.
- Health & Medicine
Hemispheric Cross Talk: Brains show two sides of language function
Some people coordinate language use with both sides of their brains, allowing them to retain verbal skills after damage to one side or the other.
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Evolution’s Death Row: Groups surviving mass extinction still go bust
Groups of species may persist through major extinction events only to die off in the aftermath.
- Materials Science
Wiregate: Metallic picket fence flips magnetic bits
Rather than relegate magnetic fields to the usual backup role of data storage for computers, a new microcircuit exploits those fields for computation, possibly leading to cheaper, lower-power chips than traditional electronic ones.
- Plants
Mirror Image: Flowers with opposite styles have a fling
Scientists have discovered a gene that controls whether flowers lean to the left or the right.
- Astronomy
Outlier Planet: Extrasolar places that are like home
A team of veteran hunters of planets outside the solar system has come up with a landmark finding: a Jupiterlike planet orbiting a Sunlike star at a Jupiterlike distance.
- Health & Medicine
Smart Drugs: Leukemia treatments nearing prime time
Three new drugs stop acute myeloid leukemia in mice, suggesting the treatments will work in people with this deadly blood cancer.
- Physics
Voyager spacecraft still buffeted by sun
Even though the two Voyager probes launched in 1977 passed the outermost planets in our solar system more than a decade ago, their sensors show that they can't yet outrun the influence of solar flares.
- Earth
Famed undersea vent may be lost
When scientists last month tried to revisit an undersea hydrothermal vent first discovered nearly a quarter of a century ago, they found the site desolate, possibly paved by a fresh volcanic eruption.
- Earth
Mangled microfossils may mark impact sites
Scientists studying sediment cores drilled in eastern Virginia say they’ve possibly identified a new clue to the locations of ancient, hidden impact craters: Just look for broken or twisted microbial fossils.
- Humans
Small lab animals exempted from law
The new farm bill explicitly exempts rats, mice, and birds from coverage under the federal Animal Welfare Act.
