Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Plants
Bacteria help carnivorous plants drown their prey
Pitcher plant drowning traps are more difficult for an insect to escape when bacteria colonize them.
- Paleontology
Cretaceous bird find holds new color clue
New molecular clues in 130-million-year-old bird fossil could help paleontologists firm up case for ancient color in dinosaurs.
- Animals
Brazilian free-tailed bats are the fastest fliers
Ultrafast flying by one bat species leaves birds in the dust.
- Animals
An echidna’s to-do list: Sleep. Eat. Dig up Australia.
Short-beaked echidna’s to-do list looks good for a continent losing other digging mammals.
- Plants
Tweaking how plants manage a crisis boosts photosynthesis
Shortening plants’ recovery time after blasts of excessive light can boost crop growth.
- Health & Medicine
This week in Zika: Vaginal vulnerability, disease double trouble and more
Puerto Rico cases of Zika suggest that the virus prefers women. And two new findings reveal more about Zika’s transmission and ability to survive outside the body.
- Animals
In some ways, hawks hunt like humans
Raptors may track their prey in similar patterns to primates.
- Neuroscience
Despite Alzheimer’s plaques, some seniors remain mentally sharp
Plaques and tangles riddle the brains of some very old and very healthy people.
- Neuroscience
Protein linked to Parkinson’s travels from gut to brain
Parkinson’s protein can travel from gut to brain, mouse study suggests.
- Health & Medicine
Chinese patient is first to be treated with CRISPR-edited cells
Researchers used CRISPR/Cas9 to engineer immune cells that were then injected into a patient with lung cancer, the journal Nature reports.
- Paleontology
Dinosaurs may have used color as camouflage
Fossilized pigments could paint a vivid picture of a dinosaur’s life.
- Animals
Skimpy sea ice linked to reindeer starvation on land
Unseasonably scant sea ice may feed rain storms inland that lead to ice catastrophes that kill Yamal reindeer and threaten herders’ way of life.
