Life

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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Animals

    The diabolical ironclad beetle can survive getting run over by a car. Here’s how

    The diabolical ironclad beetle is an incredibly tough little creature. A peek inside its exoskeleton reveals what makes it virtually uncrushable.

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  2. Animals

    Naked mole-rats invade neighboring colonies and steal babies

    Naked mole-rats invade neighboring colonies, steal pups and evict any others left behind. The show of force may be central to their underground lifestyle.

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  3. Animals

    Fire ants build little syphons out of sand to feed without drowning

    To escape a watery death, some fire ants use build sand structures that draw the insects’ sugary, liquid food out of containers and to a safer place.

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  4. Animals

    A rope bridge restored a highway through the trees for endangered gibbons

    When critically endangered Hainan gibbons started making dangerous leaps across a new gully, researchers came up with an alternative route.

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  5. Plants

    How Venus flytraps store short-term ‘memories’ of prey

    Glowing Venus flytraps reveal how calcium buildup in the cells of leaves acts as a short-term “memory” that helps the plants identify prey.

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  6. Animals

    Glowing blue helps shield this tardigrade from harmful ultraviolet light

    Tardigrades have a newly discovered trick up their sleeve: fluorescence.

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  7. Life

    A glowing zebrafish wins the 2020 Nikon Small World photography contest

    The annual competition features snapshots that use microscopy to reveal some of Earth’s smallest hidden marvels.

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  8. Animals

    Pufferfish may be carving mysterious ‘crop circles’ near Australia

    In 2011, scientists discovered that tiny pufferfish were sculpting Japan’s underwater “mystery circles.” Now, more circles have emerged in Australia.

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  9. Genetics

    Gene-editing tool CRISPR wins the chemistry Nobel

    A gene-editing tool developed just eight years ago that has “revolutionized the life sciences” nabbed the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

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  10. Animals

    This rare bird is male on one side and female on the other

    Researchers at Powdermill Nature Reserve near Pittsburgh spotted a bird with pink male coloring on half of its body and yellow female hues on the other.

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  11. Neuroscience

    Your dog’s brain doesn’t care about your face

    Comparing brain scans of people and pups shows that faces hold no special meaning to the brains of dogs, a new study suggests.

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  12. Health & Medicine

    Hepatitis C discoveries win 2020 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine

    The 2020 medicine Nobel recognizes work that found that a novel virus was to blame for chronic hepatitis and led to a test to screen blood donations.

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