Humans

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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Humans

    Early Americans took two tool tracks

    Creators of separate spearhead styles colonized North America more than 13,000 years ago.

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  2. Humans

    BLOG: Humans’ not-so singular status

    Reporting from the Euroscience Open Forum in Dublin, editor in chief Tom Siegfried discusses how neuroscience and artificial intelligence research are challenging ideas of selfhood and humankind's specialness.

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  3. Health & Medicine

    Proliferation protein goes rogue in lung cancer

    Rac1b might promote malignancy, could be a target for treatment.

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  4. Health & Medicine

    Memories clutter brain in amnesia

    Complex patterns slow down object recognition in patients with disorder.

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  5. Humans

    Warning to bats: Cuddle not

    Ecologist Kate Langwig of Boston University and her colleagues want Eastern bats to listen up: No more cuddling — at least during hibernation. Just keep those wings to yourselves.

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  6. Humans

    Apocalypse, not so fast

    Guatemalan find suggests mention of a date far in the future served a Maya king’s immediate needs.

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  7. Health & Medicine

    Some brains may be primed for pain

    When people keep hurting long after an injury heals, a process similar to addiction may be at work.

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  8. Health & Medicine

    Body and Brain

    Good touch, bad touch A leg caress can delight or feel totally skeevy, depending on who’s doing the caressing. A touch’s emotional baggage can be seen in the brain’s initial response to that touch, scientists report in the June 19 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Heterosexual men’s somatosensory cortices, brain regions that detect […]

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  9. Animals

    Mosquitoes Remade

    Scientists reinvent agents of illness to become allies in fight against disease.

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  10. Archaeology

    Oldest pottery comes from Chinese cave

    New dates show that East Asian hunter-gatherers fired up cooking vessels 20,000 years ago.

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  11. Health & Medicine

    Male contraceptive shows promise

    Two hormones in gels applied to the skin effectively lower sperm counts, a study finds.

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  12. Humans

    Lead poisoning stymies condor recovery

    California’s iconic comeback species may need human help as long as even a small percentage of the carcasses they eat contain lead shot.

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