Vol. 187 No. 11
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More Stories from the May 30, 2015 issue

  1. Health & Medicine

    Why cancer patients waste away

    A tumor-produced protein that interferes with insulin causes wasting in fruit flies with cancer.

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  2. Anthropology

    Ritual cannibalism occurred in England 14,700 years ago

    Human bones show signs of ritual cannibalism in England 14,700 years ago.

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  3. Paleontology

    ‘Frankenstein’ dinosaur was a mash-up of meat eater and plant eater

    Fossils of a bizarre-looking dinosaur found in Chile are challenging ideas about how dinosaurs adapted to their environments.

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  4. Ecosystems

    Just 1 percent of Amazon’s trees hold half of its carbon

    Roughly 1 percent of tree species in the Amazon rainforest account for half of the jungle’s carbon storage.

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  5. Psychology

    Childhood bullying leads to long-term mental health problems

    U.S., British data raise bullying’s profile as a long-term mental health hazard for kids.

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  6. Astronomy

    Tiny explosions add up to heat corona

    Millions of mini-explosions every second on the sun could solve the riddle of why the sun’s atmosphere is so much warmer than its surface.

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  7. Earth

    Cosmic rays illuminate lightning

    Radio waves emitted by particles zipping through thunderstorms allow physicists to probe thunderclouds and, perhaps eventually, learn what triggers lightning strikes.

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  8. Paleontology

    This dinosaur’s ride may have been a glide

    A new dino called Yi qi may have taken to the skies with wings akin to those of pterosaurs and flying squirrels.

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  9. Genetics

    DNA disorganization linked to aging

    Changes in the way that DNA is tightly packed in cells leads to mayhem that promotes the aging process.

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  10. Neuroscience

    Zipping to Mars could badly zap brain nerve cells

    Charged particles like the ones astronauts might encounter wallop the brain, mouse study suggests.

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  11. Physics

    Scientists take first picture of thunder

    Scientists precisely capture thunder sound waves radiating from artificially triggered lightning.

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  12. Microbes

    Possible nearest living relatives to complex life found in seafloor mud

    New phylum of sea-bottom archaea microbes could be closest living relatives yet found to the eukaryote domain of complex life that includes people.

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  13. Genetics

    Editing human germline cells sparks ethics debate

    Human gene editing experiments raise scientific and societal questions.

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  14. Chemistry

    Bacteria staining method has long been misexplained

    New research upends what scientists know about a classic lab technique, called gram staining, used for more than a century to characterized and classify bacteria.

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  15. Health & Medicine

    Kids who have had measles are at higher risk of fatal infections

    Measles infection leaves kids vulnerable to other infectious diseases for much longer than scientists suspected.

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  16. Climate

    Rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide rise unprecedented

    The current rate of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere is unprecedented over at least the last 66 million years, new research shows.

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  17. Quantum Physics

    Quantum experiment dissects wave-particle mash-up

    A modified version of a landmark quantum physics experiment has shown that a single parcel of light can be a particle and a wave simultaneously.

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  18. Animals

    Vampire squid take mommy breaks

    The vampire squid again defies its sensationalist name with a life in the slow lane.

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  19. Plants

    The art and science of the hedgerow

    Spiky hawthorn trees have found many uses despite their unforgiving nature, Bill Vaughn writes in ‘Hawthorn.’

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  20. Science & Society

    Histories left behind by the dispossessed

    ‘Dispatches from Dystopia’ chronicles adventures in modernist wastelands to recount tales of the invisible and the overlooked, the exiled and the dispossessed.

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  21. Animals

    Early research asked whether cats dream

    Early research asked whether cats dream; researchers still don’t know definitively.

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