Vol. 189 No. 8
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More Stories from the April 16, 2016 issue

  1. Plants

    How to keep seagrasses as happy as a clam

    Drought can do more damage to seagrass meadows if their partnership with clams break down.

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  2. Materials Science

    New process encourages ice to slip, slide away

    Researchers discover new process for making durable ice-phobic materials.

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  3. Paleontology

    New tyrannosaur bridges gap from medium to monstrous

    Horse-sized Timurlengia euotica had a brain and ears like its bigger relative Tyrannosaurus rex, which lived millions of years later.

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  4. Ecosystems

    Australian fairy circles first to be found outside Africa

    Strange patterns of grassland bald spots called fairy circles show up in Western Australia.

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  5. Materials Science

    Playing with building blocks for metamaterial design

    Legos show promise as a low-cost method to assist scientists in developing novel metamaterials.

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  6. Neuroscience

    Lost memories retrieved for mice with signs of Alzheimer’s

    Using light, scientists coaxed a forgotten memory from the brains of mice with Alzheimer’s-like symptoms.

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  7. Physics

    Like birds of a feather, sperm flock together

    Studies of sperm show that they swim in groups because of the elasticity of the mucus they travel through.

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  8. Paleontology

    How to tell if a T. rex is expecting

    A “pregnancy” test for tyrannosaurs relies on chemical analyses of medullary bone, a reproductive tissue found in female birds.

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  9. Earth

    CO2 shakes up theory of how geysers spout

    Carbon dioxide helps fuel eruptions of Spouter Geyser, and perhaps other features, in Yellowstone National Park, new research suggests.

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  10. Math

    Mathematicians find a peculiar pattern in primes

    Consecutive prime numbers don’t behave as randomly as mathematicians assumed.

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  11. Physics

    New type of catalyst could aid hydrogen fuel

    A substance that can switch states might make an efficient catalyst for extracting hydrogen from water.

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  12. Animals

    Piggybacking tadpoles are epic food beggars

    Tadpoles beg so frantically among mimic poison frogs that researchers check to see whether they’re just scamming.

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  13. Animals

    It’s an herbivore-kill-herbivore world

    Female prairie dogs killing babies of another species might keep competitors off the grass.

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  14. Genetics

    Scientists build minimum-genome bacterium

    Minimal genome organism reveals how much scientists don’t know about biology.

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  15. Genetics

    Zika may have flown to Brazil in 2013

    The brand of Zika currently floating around the Americas traces its origins to Asia and may have arrived in Brazil by air as early as 2013.

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  16. Health & Medicine

    Environment still tied to MS risk

    50 years ago, scientists reported a possible connection between the environment and multiple sclerosis risk.

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  17. Environment

    Dome effect leaves Chinese megacities under thick haze

    Airborne black carbon lowers an atmospheric boundary, trapping pollution around major cities and worsening air quality, researchers propose.

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  18. Microbes

    This microbe makes a meal of plastic

    A newly identified bacterium can break down plastic waste.

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  19. Paleontology

    Disney’s ‘The Jungle Book’ resurrects giant extinct ape

    Disney’s latest version of ‘The Jungle Book’ features Gigantopithecus, the largest known ape ever to have lived.

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  20. Astronomy

    There’s far more to the galaxy than meets the eye

    A new map of the galaxy as seen in submillimeter light reveals intricate details from nearby nebulas to the far-flung galactic center.

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  21. Agriculture

    Climate change threatens quality of French, Swiss wines

    Wine quality could suffer as climate change desynchronizes warm temperatures and droughts, preventing grape growers from harvesting at the optimum time.

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