News

  1. Life

    A more fearsome saber-toothed cat

    Analyses of fossils reveal that a third, newly recognized type of saber-toothed cat — one that killed by biting large chunks of flesh from its victim instead of biting its neck and slashing the major blood vessels there —roamed the Americas about a million years ago.

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  2. Paleontology

    How pterosaurs took flight

    Extinct flying reptiles known as pterosaurs may have taken to the air with a technique akin to leapfrogging, new research suggests.

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  3. Space

    More problems with Hubble

    Hubble’s resurrection is suspended while engineers examine two anomalies.

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  4. Earth

    An electronic nose that smells plants’ pain

    Device can detect distress signals from plants that are harmed, under attack.

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  5. Humans

    Rumors of Gulf War Syndrome

    British Gulf War veterans responded to military secrecy by talking among themselves about their health problems. Through rumor, the vets collectively defined the controversial ailment known as Gulf War Syndrome, a new study suggests.

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  6. Life

    Fossil find may document largest snake

    Rocks beneath a coal mine in Colombia have yielded fossils of what could be the world's largest snake, a 12.8-meter–long behemoth that's a relative of today's boa constrictors.

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  7. Earth

    Primordial soup lives again

    Fifty-five years later, new analyses of leftovers from Stanley Miller's famous 'primordial soup' experiment suggest that life could have originated near volcanoes.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    Bacteria that do logic

    A team engineers microbes to perform AND, OR, NAND and NOR logic operations.

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  9. Space

    Hubble revives

    A plan to switch the Hubble Space Telescope to a backup system works, waking up the telescope after more than two weeks of silence.

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  10. Life

    How Tiktaalik got its neck

    The oldest fossil with a neck, Tiktaalik roseae, shows how animals developed a head for living on land.

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  11. Health & Medicine

    Streamlined polio vaccine fights outbreaks

    Back to basics: A simplified polio vaccine works better than the standard approach and overcomes an unforeseen shortcoming in the widely used oral vaccine.

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  12. Humans

    Bypassing paralyzed nerves

    Implanted electrode helps paralyzed monkey clench its forearm muscles.

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