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Beaks change songs in Darwin’s finches
A new look—and listen—at Darwin's finches finds that the famous relationship between beak size and food supply affects their courtship songs as well.
By Susan Milius -
Do people flirt like guppies?
Researchers who have studied how female guppies copy other females' choice of mate are tackling the same question in Homo sapiens.
By Susan Milius -
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Health & MedicineInfectious Notion
Lessons from gene therapy promote viruses as cancer fighters.
By Ruth Bennett -
AnimalsSlavemaker Ants: Misunderstood Farmers?
A test of what once seemed too obvious to test—whether ant colonies suffer after being raided by slavemaker ants—suggests that some of the raiding insects have been getting unfair press.
By Susan Milius -
Health & MedicineDNA vaccine immunizes fetal lambs
Canadian scientists have devised a way to vaccinate fetal lambs, which could spawn more research into in utero methods for preventing the spread of disease from mothers to their babies.
By Nathan Seppa -
AstronomyYoung pulsar has a split personality
A new pulsar, the youngest discovered to date, unexpectedly exhibits properties of both regular pulsars and a recently explored class of supermagnetic pulsars, the magnetars.
By Ruth Bennett -
Study explores abortion’s mental aftermath
A majority of women report no increase in psychological problems after having an abortion, although nearly one in five express dissatisfaction and regret 2 years later about their decision.
By Bruce Bower -
Skin cells reveal they have hairy origins
The outer layers of the skin may spring from cells in hair follicles.
By John Travis -
TechNanotechnologists get a squirt gun, almost
A novel computer simulation of molecular behavior suggests that a minuscule squirt gun able to spit liquids a few hundred nanometers ought to work.
By Peter Weiss -
PaleontologyFeathered fossil still stirs debate
More than 2 years after scientists first described 120-million-year-old fossils of a feathered animal, a new analysis seems to bolster the view that the turkey-size species was a bird has-been and not a bird wanna-be.
By Sid Perkins -
AstronomyTelescope takes close-ups of distant star
Radio astronomers have for the first time probed ejected gas in the immediate surroundings of a distant star.
By Ron Cowen