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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Neuroscience

    Sleep may trigger rhythmic power washing in the brain

    Strong, rhythmic waves of cerebrospinal fluid wash into the human brain during sleep and may help clean out harmful proteins.

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  2. Life

    Vampire bat friendships endure from captivity to the wild

    Vampire bats can form social bonds that persist from a lab setting to the outdoors, suggesting the cooperative relationships are like friendships.

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  3. Life

    Saharan silver ants are the world’s fastest despite relatively short legs

    Saharan silver ants can hit speeds of 108 times their body length per second.

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  4. Space

    The solar system may have a new smallest dwarf planet: Hygiea

    New images reveal Hygiea is round, a final criterion for promoting the wee world from asteroid to dwarf planet status.

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  5. Animals

    Humpback whales use their flippers and bubble ‘nets’ to catch fish

    A study reveals new details of how humpback whales hunt using their flippers and a whirl of bubbles to capture fish.

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  6. Space

    A supermassive black hole shredded a star and was caught in the act

    Astronomers have gotten the earliest glimpse yet of a black hole ripping up a star, a process known as a tidal disruption event.

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  7. Climate

    Malin Pinsky seeks to explain how climate change alters ocean life

    As global temperatures rise, Malin Pinsky’s research attempts to understand how marine ecosystems are changing and why.

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  8. Life

    We’ve lost 3 billion birds since 1970 in North America

    Scientists estimated the change in total number of individual birds since 1970. They found profound losses spread among rare and common birds alike.

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  9. Humans

    A 3.8-million-year-old skull reveals the face of Lucy’s possible ancestors

    A fossilized hominid skull found in an Ethiopian desert illuminates the earliest-known Australopithecus species.

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  10. Anthropology

    A tiny skull fossil suggests primate brain areas evolved separately

    Digital reconstruction of a fossilized primate skull reveals that odor and vision areas developed independently starting 20 million years ago or more.

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  11. Life

    How these tiny insect larvae leap without legs

    High-speed filming reveals how a blob of an insect can leap more efficiently than it crawls.

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  12. Astronomy

    A 3-D map of stars reveals the Milky Way’s warped shape

    Our galaxy flaunts its curves in a chart of thousands of stars called Cepheids.

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