Life

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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Plants

    Bacteria help carnivorous plants drown their prey

    Pitcher plant drowning traps are more difficult for an insect to escape when bacteria colonize them.

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  2. 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.

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  3. Animals

    Brazilian free-tailed bats are the fastest fliers

    Ultrafast flying by one bat species leaves birds in the dust.

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  4. 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.

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  5. Plants

    Tweaking how plants manage a crisis boosts photosynthesis

    Shortening plants’ recovery time after blasts of excessive light can boost crop growth.

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  6. 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.

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  7. Animals

    In some ways, hawks hunt like humans

    Raptors may track their prey in similar patterns to primates.

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  8. Neuroscience

    Despite Alzheimer’s plaques, some seniors remain mentally sharp

    Plaques and tangles riddle the brains of some very old and very healthy people.

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  9. Neuroscience

    Protein linked to Parkinson’s travels from gut to brain

    Parkinson’s protein can travel from gut to brain, mouse study suggests.

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  10. 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.

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  11. Paleontology

    Dinosaurs may have used color as camouflage

    Fossilized pigments could paint a vivid picture of a dinosaur’s life.

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  12. 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.

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