Life
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Ecosystems
Deep-sea trawling threatens oceans’ health
Dragging large nets along the seafloor to catch fish cuts organic matter and biodiversity in half and may threaten all of the world's underwater ecosystems.
- Animals
How an octopus keeps itself out of a tangle
The suckers on an octopus stick to just about anything, except the octopus itself. Scientists think they’ve figured out why.
- Health & Medicine
How Kawasaki disease may blow in with the wind
The origin of Kawasaki disease has been linked to farmlands in northeastern China.
- Animals
Lizards may scale back head bobbing to avoid predators
Brown anoles may scale back mating signals to avoid being eaten.
- Life
‘The Amoeba in the Room’ uncloaks a hidden realm of tiny life
Mycologist Nicholas Money reveals the secret (and dramatic) lives of amoebas, bacteria, fungi and other often-overlooked microbes in The Amoeba in the Room: Lives of the Microbes.
- Animals
For upside-down sloths, what goes down can’t come up
Upside-down sloths have to hold their organs up and their food down.
- Animals
Winds predict deadly jellyfish blooms
A change in the winds flowing over Australia’s Great Barrier Reef coincides with reports of the potentially fatal Irukandji syndrome.
- Animals
Fly more, live longer
An examination of animal lifestyles reveals that the most important factor linked to longer life is the ability to fly.
- Genetics
Qatari people carry genetic trace of early migrants out of Africa
Qatari genomes carry shards of DNA that date back 60,000 years, when humans began to leave Africa.
- Environment
Fukushima contamination affects butterfly larvae
Butterfly larvae fed leaves with radioactive cesium from the Fukushima nuclear disaster had a higher rate of death and development abnormalities than larvae that got leaves from a location farther from the accident.
- Paleontology
Fragments of long-bodied dino found in Argentina
Named Leinkupal laticauda, the new species dino probably lived into the early Cretaceous period, which began roughly 145 million years ago.
- Animals
Anemone eats bird, and other surprising animal meals
A fuzzy green anemone eating a bird many times its size shows that you can’t take anything for granted when it comes to which animals can eat each other.
