Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Animals
‘Whalecopter’ drone swoops in for a shot and a shower
Whale biologists are monitoring the health of whales using drones that snap photos and then swoop in to sample spray.
- Climate
Climate change could shift New England’s fall foliage
Climate change could make for earlier or later fall color, depending on where you live in New England.
- Neuroscience
Multitaskers do worse on tasks that require focus
Multitasking is more likely to impair teens’ focusing ability than improve it, study testing attention skills finds.
- Animals
DNA trail leads to new spot for dog domestication
A new study suggests that dogs were first domesticated in Central Asia.
- Life
Genetic tweaks manipulate DNA’s loops
Scientists have changed the loops and curls of DNA as it packs into a nucleus.
- Earth
4.1-billion-year-old crystal may hold earliest signs of life
A carbon impurity embedded inside an ancient zircon crystal suggests that life on Earth appeared before 4.1 billion years ago.
- Earth
4.1-billion-year-old crystal may hold earliest signs of life
New evidence suggests that life on Earth arose before 4.1 billion years ago, 300 million years earlier than previous estimates.
- Animals
Slow, cold reptiles may breathe like energetic birds
Finding birdlike air patterns in lungs of crocodilians and in more distantly related lizards raises the possibility that one-way airflow evolved far earlier than birds themselves did.
- Neuroscience
Signs of Huntington’s show up in the brain in childhood
Hints of Huntington’s disease show up in the brain long before symptoms do.
- Animals
Marine biologist chronicles a lifelong love of fishing
In A Naturalist Goes Fishing, a marine biologist takes readers on a round-the-world fishing expedition
- Paleontology
New evidence weakens case against climate in woolly mammoths’ death
Hunters responsible for woolly mammoths’ extinction, suggests a chemical analysis of juveniles’ tusks.
- Climate
High-flying birds recruited for meteorology
Monitoring the midflight movements of high-flying birds can provide valuable meteorological data, new research shows.
